The $75M Gamble That Made Just $100K: Inside Qubic's Monero Takeover Attempt and the War That Followed

When you spend $75 million to secure $100,000 in profit, you’re not running a mining operation—you’re orchestrating a calculated message. This is the story behind Qubic’s deliberate 51% attack on Monero, an audacious power play that exposed both the vulnerabilities in privacy coins and the ideological battle brewing in the crypto community.

The Numbers Don’t Add Up (And That’s The Whole Point)

Let’s start with the math that broke the internet. According to SlowMist founder Yu Xian’s estimates, maintaining 51% control of Monero’s hash rate costs approximately $75 million per day. The daily block rewards? Around $150,000. Even if Qubic monopolized every single Monero block on the network—earning roughly 432 XMR daily at current prices (~$246 per coin)—the daily profit would barely hit $106,000.

This isn’t a typo. This is intentional.

Crypto51.com offers hourly rental rates for attacking other PoW networks as reference points: Ethereum Classic runs about $11,563/hour, Litecoin approximately $131,413/hour. But Monero? The CPU-only mining requirement makes it uniquely expensive. Achieving 51% would theoretically require 44,302 AMD Threadripper processors alone—a $220 million equipment bill before factoring in electricity, hosting, and operations.

The gap between cost and profit is so vast that it forces the question: why would anyone do this? The answer reveals Qubic’s true strategy.

The Qubic Gambit: It Was Never About Monero’s Blocks

Founded by IOTA co-founder Sergey Ivancheglo (pseudonym: Come-From-Beyond), Qubic introduced “Useful Proof of Work” (UPoW)—a mechanism where miners solve problems while simultaneously training an AI system called Aigarth. Starting in May 2025, Qubic pivoted this computing power toward Monero mining in a coordinated challenge announced to run through August 31st.

The operation wasn’t a mining strategy. It was a confidence game.

Miners earned both Monero rewards AND $QUBIC tokens. The Monero was immediately liquidated into stablecoins to fund buybacks and burns of $QUBIC—creating a self-reinforcing loop. The tokens were the real product. With a market cap under $300 million, $QUBIC tokens could theoretically command the hash power of Monero (market cap ~$4.6 billion). If successful, this demonstrated that a smaller-cap token could lever enormous computing resources through clever tokenomics.

As long as mining remained profitable on paper—as long as $QUBIC held its price—the hash power would keep flowing in.

Monero’s Suspicious Summer

By August, monitoring showed signs of network stress. Block times fluctuated abnormally. An orphan block appeared 12 hours before Qubic’s public announcement—suspiciously convenient timing. Qubic mysteriously stopped reporting hash rate data to public pool websites in early August, an opacity that invited speculation about peak capacity concealment.

Reddit monitors watching every block caught the smoking gun: a chain reorg involving six consecutive blocks. Qubic then claimed achieving 52.72% hash rate control—just above the 51% threshold needed to theoretically reorganize chains and execute double-spends.

But skepticism spread quickly. Community member @VictorMoneroXMR highlighted data inconsistencies: Qubic’s dashboard showed 2.45 GH/s while reporting the network hashrate as 5.35 GH/s—proportions that didn’t align with other pools reporting 4.41 GH/s combined. Adjusted calculations suggested Qubic controlled closer to 30%, not 50%+. More damning, the community observed no sustained attack signs during the challenge period—no wave of orphaned blocks, no repeated chain reorgs, no evidence of months-long 51% stability.

The consensus: Qubic might have briefly touched 51% for minutes, but this wasn’t a functional attack. It was psychological warfare wrapped in PowerPoint screenshots.

The Architecture of a Collapsing Pyramid

Here’s where Qubic’s model reveals its fatal flaw: it’s built on a foundation of pure confidence.

Qubic doesn’t profit directly from Monero rewards. Instead, it profits by drawing miners through token appreciation and narrative. As long as $QUBIC maintains or grows in value, miners sell their Monero-earned rewards to buy more tokens, their returns appear attractive, and the cycle sustains. But the instant miners suspect $QUBIC is unsustainable, the stampede begins—mass selling, price collapse, and exodus.

This is mining as a Ponzi accelerant. The attack on Monero was designed to generate buzz, pump $QUBIC trading volume and price, and attract speculative capital. For months it worked. But it also triggered counterattacks.

Monero’s Defensive Response and Ideological War

The Monero community didn’t remain passive. During Qubic’s challenge, Qubic’s mining pool itself suffered a DDoS attack, with reported hashrate plummeting from 2.6 GH/s to 0.8 GH/s—a 70% drop. Ivancheglo blamed Sergei Chernykh, lead developer of XMRig (Monero’s primary mining software). Chernykh immediately denied involvement: “I’m not the only one unhappy with Qubic’s actions, but I would never resort to illegal DDoS tactics.”

The community’s response escalated beyond technology into ideology and markets. Some Monero members proposed a “#ShortQubic movement”—collectively shorting $QUBIC tokens, even with leverage, to strangle miner enthusiasm at the source. The irony was cutting: if you want to short crypto, attacking Qubic’s economic foundation seemed viable.

Deeper analysis revealed philosophical rifts. Most of Qubic’s team operates under pseudonyms; only Ivancheglo and scientist David Vivancos use real names. Vivancos is known as a vocal proponent of “technocratic” governance—rule by technical experts and data. This directly contradicts Monero’s core values of decentralization, privacy, and community autonomy. For hardline Monero believers, Qubic represented more than a technical threat; it was an ideological invasion.

What’s Left: An Unfinished Battle

This conflict remains unresolved. Monero’s community is larger and more ideologically unified, but Qubic’s financial resources are substantial. The fundamental question lingers: can Qubic sustain its mining operation and $QUBIC token price indefinitely? Or will miners eventually realize the emperor wears no clothes—that $75 million in daily costs for $100,000 in profit is mathematically indefensible for any non-speculative purpose?

What’s clear is that this attack wasn’t truly about controlling Monero. It was a demonstration of how modern crypto projects weaponize tokenomics and hash power to challenge each other. As the cryptocurrency industry continues to evolve, such “economic demonstrations” may become increasingly common. Whether communities like Monero can effectively defend against this hybrid attack model—technical, financial, and narrative—will define the next chapter of blockchain security.

The Monero-Qubic war remains an ongoing experiment in whether decentralized communities can outmaneuver centralized capital. For those watching the crypto landscape, it’s a masterclass in how incentives, narratives, and network effects collide at scale.