Monero is currently going through an unusually high rate of orphan blocks, causing concern amongst the cryptocurrency community. Further reading – Five orphan blocks found on Monero between Aug 6-7. This new development continues the CFB (come-from-beyond) sponsored long-term plan to monopolize Monero’s hashrate. They’ve been keenly working towards this goal since long before May 2025.
CFB advised exchanges and other affected parties to prepare for orphan blocks on Monero from August 2 through August 31. In that same time frame, the Monero network saw five orphan blocks or between five and 24 hours measured over the last 720 blocks.
Vini Barbosa Vini has more than 10,000 hours of experience in the crypto industry since 2020. He is fully engaged and paying close attention and remaining a step ahead of things.
When two or more miners find and propagate the same fully valid block height nearly at the same time. Monero Research Labs emphasizes that an elevated orphaned block rate can be used to indicate problems with network-wide connection latency. It can serve to flag suspicious malicious behavior on the network.
They occur naturally when two miners mine different valid blocks almost simultaneously. A high rate of orphaned blocks can indicate a problem in network-wide connection latency or even malicious behavior by one or more entities with a large hashpower share. If a malicious entity with a high share of network hashpower attempted a selfish mining strategy to raise its share of block rewards, the rate of orphaned blocks could increase. The malicious entity would cause the blocks of other pools to become orphaned." - Monero Research Labs
CFB, a lead developer of Bytecoin, has been adamant about Qubic’s plans to hijack Monero since May 2025. Bytecoin, one of the precursor crypto projects that came before Monero, notoriously had an 82% premine of coins.
CFB rather inadvertently took credit for these episodes of orphaning blocks. Shortly before these incidents, CFB sent an advance notice to exchanges and other parties that manage Monero.
Dear $XMR holders, the #Qubic team is unable to contact every single service accepting #Monero coins, please, inform the exchanges and the other relevant entities that from the 2nd of August, 12:00 UTC to the 31st of August, 12:00 UTC it is STRONGLY recommended to accept $XMR…" - Come-from-Beyond (@c___f___b)
Qubic’s pool has apparently gone “dark” by hiding its hashrate from the rest of the network’s nodes. In particular, this action has resulted in a marked increase in the block-discovery share of “unknown” miners, rising from 2% to 8%.
Interestingly, the “unknown” miner was responsible for four of the five cases of orphan blocks. This has only added fire for rampant speculation with regards to possible malicious activity on the network.
"Unknown was around 2% before Pubic went into hiding." - Victor (@VictorMoneroXMR)
Notably, the "unknown" miner was involved in four out of the five occurrences of orphan blocks. This has further fueled speculation about potential malicious activity on the network.
However, Ricardo Spagni suggests caution against jumping to conclusions.
"I don’t think it’s so much higher than normal so as to be an outlier – it’s within normal distribution. If it happens for 3 days consecutively I might consider it outside of Poisson distribution, but even then it may just be an outlier." - Ricardo Spagni
