The Cardano blockchain successfully thwarted a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack aimed at stealing staked tokens.

The attack had minimal impact on ADA’s value, which saw a slight increase of 0.4% over the past 24 hours to $0.38 at the time of reporting, according to data from CryptoSlate.

Details of the Attack

On June 25, Raul Antonio Rosa Padilla, CTO of Fluid Token, disclosed that the blockchain faced an attack at Block 10,487,530. The attacker sought to overwhelm the network by initiating transactions costing 0.9 ADA each, targeting 194 smart contracts with multiple transactions per block. Despite these efforts, the Cardano network continued to function normally, resulting in the attacker losing funds instead of successfully stealing them.

Phillip Disarro, founder of Anastasia Labs, a development company on Cardano, recommended that users could help halt the attack by deregistering any of the 194 stake credentials used by the attacker. He highlighted deregistration as the quickest method, offering users 2 ADA tokens per deregistered credential until the attacker’s 400 ADA was exhausted.

Disarro clarified:

“To clarify, the network is operating as designed. Liveliness remains unaffected. All parameters (block size limit, transaction size limits, block times) are set conservatively, rendering any liveliness attack financially futile.”

After Disarro's announcement, the DDoS attacker ceased their activities to prevent further financial losses. Disarro noted the irony that the attacker unintentionally supported open-source development efforts at Anastasia Labs and Midgard.

While the blockchain maintained normal operations, Intersect, a Cardano community group, acknowledged that the attack had a negative impact on some stake pool operators (SPOs). Efforts are underway to devise solutions to prevent such incidents in the future. The group stated:

“The network experienced higher-than-normal traffic, leading to challenges for some SPOs due to increased block height competition. Nonetheless, the overall chain functioned as expected, with minimal impact on transaction speeds and slight reduction in chain density.”