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Litecoin is currently in the spotlight following reports of a potential zero-day exploit, sparking concerns in the crypto community. In light of this, Litecoin developers have issued an update outlining what happened. In a five-point tweet, Litecoin's official X account outlined the sequence of events in the incident.
Litecoin stated that a zero-day bug caused a DoS attack that disrupted major mining pools. Subsequently, non-updated mining nodes allowed an invalid MWEB transaction, allowing them to peg out coins to third-party DEXs. A 13-block reorg reversed the invalid transactions and they will not be included in the main chain. The Litecoin team stated that all valid transactions during that period were unaffected.
The bug has now been fully patched, and the Litecoin network continues to operate normally. A new core version was released subsequently, including important security updates.
A 51% attack is regarded as an original threat to blockchain security, especially for proof-of-work blockchains, which include Litecoin. This is made possible by the fact that blockchain consensus algorithms essentially implement majority rule. If an attacker controls over 50% of the hashrate of a PoW blockchain, they can create new blocks faster than the rest of the network combined.
In August 2025, Monero saw an attempted 51% attack, with Qubic mining pool performing a six-block deep reorganization of the Monero ledger and orphaning around 60 blocks.
New Litecoin update released
Shortly after it provided an update on the incident, Litecoin announced a new Core version 0.21.5.4 release, which includes important security updates. It urges all node operators and wallet users to upgrade as soon as possible.
The release contains fixes for highlighted security issues and corrects MWEB input/output accounting going forward and is a required upgrade for all node operators, miners, and wallet users. It prevents kernel fee overflow during MWEB transaction validation and erases block data for mutated blocks to avoid miner DoS. Miners no longer include MWEB transactions when the input and output commitments in the block would sum to zero.
Dan Burgin
U.Today Editorial Team
