It is not the first time that it has happened, I remember at least two other precedents during the last year, the first in December 2018 and the second in spring 2019; now it has happened again, a 51% attack against Vertcoin has been successful. It was clear that something strange was happening as early as November 30th when the rental prices of the hashrate for Vertcoin Lyra2REv3's mining algorithm increased significantly probably to show that the attacker had started buying network power necessary to launch his attack; as reported by James Lovejoy, Vertcoin's main maintainer, the cost of the attack was between 0.5 and 1BTC, compared to a value that could be subtracted from the network of about 0.44 BTC, which means that attack probably would have turned out to be unprofitable.

In the end, in any case, yesterday the attacker managed to rewrite 553 blocks out of the 603 that the blockchain was processing, thus generating five "double expenses" for a total value of 125VTC (not even $ 30); even though it may appear to be a self-defeating move, in light of what the attack cost, probably the real objective of this operation was the accounts of bittrex, which was in fact promptly notified and which has currently blocked withdrawals for this currency. In any case, this time things went better than last time, on that occasion, in fact, the attacker had managed to take away an equivalent value of 100 thousand dollars. Precisely following this incident, the Vertcoin network was modified, with the introduction of Lyra2REv3, a new POW algorithm that should have made the network more solid by guaranteeing decentralization; fortunately this time the attack did not cause great damage but it is not possible to exclude that it was only a test. What is certain is that with these past, it takes courage to invest in Vercoin even in terms of mining; probably, however, the network is simply too small to deal with this kind of problem and in any case it took less than $ 6,000 to launch the attack. Who knows that growing this money can finally get rid of this kind of problems or who knows, simply, all these problems do not compromise the future.