- “A highly personal attack”
- Vibe coding?
IOG CEO Charles Hoskinson has rejected the accusations of “vibe coding” halting the Cardano blockchain.
“This is an example of a narrative that is wrong on so many levels…” the Cardano founder said in a recent social media post.
“A highly personal attack”
Earlier this week, a stake pool operator submitted a malformed delegation transaction to the Cardano mainnet.
The transaction targeted Charles Hoskinson’s personal stake pool, exploiting a deserialization bug in a cryptographic library dating back to 2022. Newer nodes parsed it incorrectly, while older nodes rejected it.
“It’s a very obscure, arcane bug that came from a library from 2022, and three years later was discovered. So, someone probably pretty smart who is pretty familiar with Cardano stumbled across something and thought that they were being cute and clever. These things happen,” Hoskinson said.
This resulted in a chain split, with the rejected chain rejecting malformed transactions and continuing normally, and the poisoned one causing invalid blocks and a temporary network partition.
Hoskinson has stated that this was “obviously” a highly personal attack.
He has also stressed that the network did not actually go down, and it has shown that it is capable of surviving such “catastrophic” events.
Block production actually continued on both chains, and the network ended up converging via node upgrades.
Vibe coding?
Homer J, the attacker, admitted responsibility on the X social media platform and expressed regret.
He claims that the exploit originated from a personal “challenge,” and AI was used as guidance in his testing, but he ended up misapplying it, which caused network disruption. This created the narrative about vibe coding, the practice of writing computer code with the help of AI tools, halting Cardano.
In his social media post, Nic Carter described the exploit as “some guy vibe coded an exploit which brought down the entire Cardano blockchain.”
However, Hoskinson insists that this narrative is false, and it is undoing ten years of “formal methods, high assurance engineering, and meticulous science.”
Source: https://u.today/cardano-founder-refutes-narrative-about-vibe-coding-halting-network
