Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson said the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is involved after a developer exploited a dormant node bug that split the $14 billion blockchain in two.
The split occurred on November 21 after a developer with the username Homer J on
“It started as a personal challenge ‘let’s see if I can reproduce the bad transaction’ and then I was stupid enough to rely on AI’s instructions on how to block all traffic in/out of my Linux server without properly testing it on testnet first,” the developer said. wrote in an X-thread after the incident.
“I felt terrible as soon as I realized the extent of what I caused,” the person said. “I know there’s nothing I can do to make up for all the pain and stress I’ve caused over the last X hours.”
Hoskinson says exploit ‘was absolutely personal’
Hoskinson rejected the claim that it was an accident. He said that the developer’s exploitation of the node bug was “definitely personal,” and that the person was “just trying to roll it back because he knows the FBI is already involved.”
Cardano works so quickly that we tracked down, repaired and caught the man in one day. He was quite active in the Fake Fred discord. It was definitely personal and now he’s trying to take it back because he knows the FBI is already involved https://t.co/MNK6d7bEWv
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) November 21, 2025
“There was a premeditated attack from a disgruntled SPO who had been in the Fake Fred feud for months and was actively looking for ways to damage IOG’s brand and reputation,” Hoskinson said. “He targeted my personal pool and that resulted in disruption of the entire Cardano network.”
Cardano Blockchain Splits in Two as Validators Failed to Reach Consensus
The Cardano ecosystem organization project Intersect said in a report that the incident occurred at approximately 8:00 UTC on November 21, when Homer J exploited “a bug in an underlying software library that was not captured by validation code.”
More specifically, it took advantage of a hash deserialization bug, which the company claims dates back to 2022.
That bug allowed the developer to “push too large a hash into a malformed delegation transaction to pass initial validation checks when it should have been rejected.”
“Previous ledger versions and the usual transaction submission tooling had masked this bug, meaning it was only triggered in recent node versions and using specialized tooling,” Intersect said.
“The execution of this transaction caused a divergence in the blockchain, effectively splitting the network into two separate chains: one with the ‘poisoned’ transaction and a ‘healthy’ chain without it.”
What raised suspicions that this was a premeditated attack was the fact that the exploit was used on the Cardano testnet just a day before the mainnet incident, according to Intersest.
After the incident, the Cardano team and several other ecosystem partners quickly resolved the issue, Hoskinson said.
Cardano Blockchain was reportedly functioning as usual, but exchanges were hesitant
Intersect said in its report that the Cardano blockchain continued to function during the incident, adding that block production continued on both chains while the network was forked.
Major exchanges including Coinbase paused ADA deposits and withdrawals while they checked which chain would secure consensus, while DeFi protocols and explorers briefly showed conflicting network states.
Coinbase documented the longest disruption, suspending withdrawals and deposits from November 21 12:15 UTC until November 22 2:10 UTC. Other exchanges, including Upbit and Kraken, implemented shorter pauses.
Meanwhile, blockchain explorers had displayed conflicting information during the partition. Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols also experienced inconsistent status across the split, with some smart contract interactions happening on one chain while related transactions ended up on the other.
Some users also reported an increase in transaction times. Normally, transactions on Cardano are executed within seconds. However, the split meant that several transactions took several minutes to execute on-chain.
The ADA price fell as much as 16% on the news before stabilizing. The Iis up over 1% in the last 24 hours to trade at $0.4130 as of 3:38 a.m. EST, facts of CoinMarketCap shows.
ADA price (source: CoinMarketCap)
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