Qubic Achieves 51% Control of Monero Network

On Monday, August 11, 2025, the Qubic protocol successfully completed its attempt to take control of the Monero network, making history. Following a month-long, high-stakes technical confrontation, Qubic achieved 51% dominance of Monero's hash rate and successfully reorganized the blockchain. This event marks a key milestone for the crypto industry and the ultimate validation of Qubic's "outsourced computation" and "Useful Proof of Work" (UPoW) models. What is Qubic? Qubic's goal is clear: to host a fully on-chain, decentralized AI model—AIGarth. To achieve this, the Qubic chain is designed to be extremely lightweight, running directly in the validator's memory. It acts as its own operating system, employs an innovative Quorum consensus mechanism, and is capable of redirecting mining power beyond simple hashing (useful proof-of-work). Becoming the world's fastest, proven blockchain (15 million transactions per second) wasn't an initial goal, but rather a byproduct of this architecture. As part of its useful proof-of-work design, Qubic needed to implement the first phase of outsourced computation and test it in a real-world environment. The Monero mining initiative initially launched as a proof-of-concept. In its first phase, Qubic split its resources in two: one for mining Monero and the other for training its AI, AIGarth. This approach proved highly profitable, at one point yielding returns nearly three times higher than directly mining Monero, while also attracting a significant amount of new hashing power to the network. This experiment was a strategic and highly competitive operation. The Qubic community voted to restructure the reward mechanism, shifting from token buybacks to direct rewards for Computors (validators of the Qubic chain). This change created a powerful economic incentive, attracting miners from other Monero mining pools and facilitating the takeover attempt. The path to Monday's success was a two-step battle. The first attempt to achieve pure 51% hashing power dominance encountered strong resistance, including a DDoS attack that lasted over a week, testing Qubic's infrastructure. This "hacker war" highlighted the resilience of Qubic's decentralized network, as the core network remained operational despite outages in peripheral services. The final successful operation, which began on August 11th, employed a more complex "selfish mining" strategy. This technique, effective when the total hash rate is slightly below or above 51%, involves the Qubic pool secretly mining blocks and withholding them from the public. The sudden surge in orphan blocks on the Monero network in the days leading up to the incident signaled the effectiveness of the Qubic strategy. This method allowed the Qubic pool to receive a significantly disproportionate share of block rewards and ultimately seize network consensus. However, due to ongoing internal discussions about whether this would impact Monero's price, the team has decided not to take over the protocol's consensus for now. An independent data scientist will verify the facts outlined in this article. According to dkat, the lead developer of Monero Experiments: dkat — 2025/8/12 19:43 In the block range [3475729, 3475850] (122 blocks total), we mined 63 blocks, exceeding our KPI of 51% block share. Congratulations to @Miner-Notifications on receiving the full reward! This data will be verified (probably by Shai from kaspa - he hates us so he'll be a fair judge). Someone on the Qubic team should write a scientific report and publish this incident on arxiv for historical archival. What's next? With the takeover test complete, the core functionality of the Monero network remains intact—privacy, speed, and usability are unaffected. However, the ultimate goal is for the security of the Monero protocol to be provided by Qubic miners, so that rewards can be distributed through the Qubic mining pool, resulting in higher returns and creating a new incentive structure for Monero miners. This historic event demonstrates the power of economic incentives and how a smaller protocol can subtly suppress a larger one. The Qubic experiment successfully validated three key theoretical points:

1. Feasibility of Outsourced Computation: Qubic's UPoW model has proven in real-world practice to be able to repurpose computing power for external tasks.

2. Incentives Drive Consensus: Any PoW blockchain can be controlled by attracting miners with higher economic incentives.

3. Infrastructure Resilience: The Qubic decentralized network demonstrated strong survivability in the face of sophisticated and sustained cyberattacks.

In this move that rewrites the rules of blockchain competition, an AI protocol with a market capitalization of $300 million successfully defeated a privacy giant with a market capitalization of $6 billion. The impact of this incident will reverberate throughout the crypto industry, providing a blueprint for future interactions between protocols and serving as a stark reminder that in decentralized systems, economic incentives are the ultimate arbiter of power.

Historical Event Timeline

• Epoch 172 Review — Monero Experiment (Hashrate Peak 50%)

• Epoch 171 Review — Engine Warmup (Hashrate Peak 45%)

• Epoch 169 Review — Qubic Suffers DDoS Attack (Hashrate Peak 24%)