Core DAO plans emergency hard fork after validators draw excess rewards

A small group of Core blockchain validators found a way to extract more block rewards than the protocol was designed to issue, and now the entire network is getting an emergency hard fork to fix the damage. Core DAO, the organization behind the Layer 1 blockchain, confirmed the incident and labeled the validators’ behavior as malicious. The project says user assets, network security, and custody systems remain unaffected, but the situation has already spooked exchanges into taking precautionary measures. What happened and what’s being done Core’s blockchain runs on a hybrid consensus mechanism called Satoshi Plus. It blends elements of Bitcoin’s delegated proof-of-work with delegated proof-of-stake, creating a system where up to 90% of newly minted CORE tokens flow to selected validators based on a complex scoring formula. That scoring system, it turns out, had a flaw. A limited number of validators figured out how to exploit the reward distribution mechanism to claim tokens beyond the protocol’s intended issuance schedule. Core DAO initially identified only a small number of actors involved. After further investigation, the project reclassified their behavior as explicitly malicio...