Monero miners lampoon Qubic’s thwarted 51% attack as publicity stunt

Absolutely not.

This was essentially the reaction from Monero’s community after IOTA co-founder Sergey Ivancheglo declared that his Qubic mining pool was aiming to capture more than half of the privacy coin’s mining power.

The Monero community banded together to halt Qubic’s takeover in July after it grabbed up to 40% control of the decentralised mining matrix, up from just 2% in May.

“The Monero community pushed back: by late July 2025, Qubic’s share fell to 10% to 15% after a coordinated boycott,” Dan Dadybayo, an analyst at Unstoppable Wallet, told DL News.

Qubic’s hashrate is under 14% as of reporting time.

Qubic was briefly the biggest Monero mining pool. Credit: MiningPoolStats But Dadybayo warned that unless the blockchain’s community makes some structural changes, then “this can happen again.”

Qubic’s failed takeover underscores how so-called 51% hashrate attacks remain a threat against decentralised finance projects.

Publicity stunt

As for why Qubic would even attempt the hash grab gambit, some respondents say the entire affair was a publicity stunt.

Qubic was trying to “drum up chatter” for its “meaningless cryptocurrency,” Seth, the pseudonymous vice president of Cake Wallet, a crypto wallet platform, told DL News.

The Qubic token surged more than 70% in the last two weeks, while Monero is down 5% within the same period.

Seth said Qubic’s business model relies on selling the Monero coins that it mines, which means a harmful attack on the blockchain would not be in its best interests.

Ivancheglo said the move wasn’t malicious and that the team was trying to showcase its capabilities while also spreading awareness of the risks of a 51% hashrate takeover.

“This is very important because one day we may all face a non-benevolent attack,” Ivancheglo wrote on X.

51% attack

Malicious actors that launch 51% hashrate attacks often do so to extract value from a blockchain network.

By controlling more than half of a blockchain’s hashpower, bad actors can reorder transactions to double-spend cryptocurrencies.

Blockchains like Firo, Ethereum Classic, and Bitcoin Gold have suffered such attacks in the past, with millions syphoned.

And Dadybayo says Monero shares a common risk factor with those blockchains: a weak security budget.

A blockchain’s security budget is the amount of value paid to miners or validators to secure the network and can be in the form of block subsidies, staking rewards, and transaction fees.

Dadybayo reckons Monero’s security budget is just weak enough to encourage hash grab attempts.

But some analysts don’t see Qubic as a threat in that regard.

“They have yet to demonstrate an ability to control consensus [and] their hash power has wildly fluctuated, and even at peak, it’d have to roughly double and be sustained to perform any 51% attacks on Monero,” Luke Parker, lead developer of Serai, a decentralised exchange, told DL News.

Story ContinuesSeth said he had “extreme doubts” that a 51% attack by Qubic could even materialise and that the goal is to reduce trust in Monero.

But such soft attacks can also be devastating, according to Dadybayo.

Even if a double-spend attack doesn’t occur, real users can lose confidence in the blockchain, Dadybayo argued, while adding that a reputational collapse is just as bad as a technical one*.*

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him at osato@dlnews.com*.*

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