Gate News message, April 26 — Litecoin experienced a deep chain reorganization (reorg) on Saturday after attackers exploited a zero-day vulnerability in its MimbleWimble Extension Block (MWEB) privacy layer, the Litecoin Foundation announced. The reorg spanned blocks 3,095,930 to 3,095,943 and took over three hours to produce.
The bug allowed mining nodes running older software to validate an invalid MWEB transaction, enabling attackers to peg coins out of the privacy extension and route them to third-party decentralized exchanges via double-spend attacks. Major mining pools were also hit by a denial-of-service attack tied to the same flaw. Aurora Labs CEO Alex Shevchenko characterized the incident as a “coordinated attack.”
The Foundation confirmed that all offending transactions were erased from Litecoin’s history while valid transactions remained unaffected, and the vulnerability has been fully patched. However, trading venues reported losses; NEAR Intents faced approximately $600,000 in exposure. LTC traded near $56.00 at 4:30 p.m. ET, down about 1% on the day and showing no immediate market reaction, though the token is down nearly 25% year-to-date.
Saturday’s incident marks the first known attack targeting MWEB since Litecoin activated the privacy extension via soft fork in May 2022. The attack occurs amid a challenging period for crypto security, with DeFi protocols losing over $750 million to exploits in 2026 through mid-April, including the $292 million Kelp DAO bridge drain and a $285 million attack on Drift.
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