Background
If you already know about Ravencoin and the vulnerability, you can just skip this background section. Ravencoin is an open-source project which started as a code-fork (copy) of Bitcoin’s code. Code changes were made to increase capacity and speed, a new name (Ravencoin) given, a different token issuance schedule for RVN built, and a new lottery mechanism for issuing new RVN (mining) was added. Ravencoin was launched as its own network on Bitcoin’s ninth birthday on Jan 3, 2018. On November 5th, 2018, the ability to create your own tokens, sub-tokens, and unique tokens was activated. Tags, restricted assets, and memo capabilities were activated on Feb 7th, 2020. The Ravencoin network consists of people voluntarily running code. This code finds and connects the nodes together into a big network capable of value transfer, and creates a tamper-proof ledger that everyone shares.
On the morning of June 29th, 2020, a discovery was made that the network was not operating as intended. Extra RVN were being minted outside of the 5000 RVN per block that are ordinarily created by the network in a once-per-minute competitive lottery.
What happened?
A vulnerability was discovered in the consensus code of Ravencoin. As you can imagine, there is a lot of new code in Ravencoin to handle…