Pornhub Cryptocurrency Verge Suffers 51% Attack

Verge, adult site Pornhub's small cryptocurrency payments application, was hit by a 560,000-blockchain reorganization, Crypto News reported Tuesday.

"The past 200 days' worth of $XVG transaction history just vanished. This is likely the deepest reorganization that has ever taken place in a 'top 100' cryptocurrency," Nilsen Report quoted Lucas Nuzzi of Coin Metrics as saying in a Twitter post.

Verge had a market valuation of more than $400 million before news of the 51% attack broke out.

An often hostile entity gains control of a chunk of the hash power on a blockchain. The entity, or "actor," can then use that power to rearrange or more technically, "reorganize," the blockchain and replace authorized blocks with their own and "double-spend" funds, according to Jeff Benson of Decrypt.

The Verge is a decentralized, open-source cryptocurrency offering different levels of secure transactions by way of blurring or confusing the IP addresses of users using Tor - an open-source privacy network that allows users to browse the internet anonymously - and by leveraging concealed transactions making it difficult to track the locations of its users.

After the reorganization, Verge is now tied with Ethereum Classic for the number of illegal network intrusions. Ethereum Classic was targeted by three straight 51% breaches inside of a month in August last year.

Verge, currently priced at $0.02404 on CoinMarketCap, gained popularity in April 2018 when the platform became the very first digital currency that was adopted by Pornhub.

In 2019, Pornhub had more than 42 billion visits, which means an average of 115 million visits per day.