Cardano network suffers chain split due to "toxic" transaction attack

Foresight News reported, citing Decrypt, that the Cardano blockchain experienced an unexpected fork on November 21 due to a malformed transaction that triggered a validation flaw. The user responsible for the incident publicly apologized on social media, stating that negligence occurred while attempting to reproduce the transaction. Intersect, the governance organization of the Cardano ecosystem, called on network operators to upgrade their software and stated that no user funds were lost in the incident. The incident report indicated that the issue stemmed from a malformed proxy transaction that passed validation on updated node versions, while nodes running older software rejected the transaction. "This exploited a bug in the underlying software library that was not caught by validation code," Intersect said. "The execution of this transaction resulted in a blockchain divergence, effectively splitting the network into a chain containing the 'toxic' transaction and a 'healthy' chain without it."