Inside Qubic's Selfish Mining Campaign on Monero: Evidence, Tactics, and Limits

Abstract

In 2025, the blockchain network Qubic conducted a mining campaign on Monero, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency. It publicly presented the campaign as a ``51\% takeover'' and a demonstration of selfish mining. The episode provides a rare opportunity to test such claims in a privacy-preserving proof-of-work network, where pool attribution and private release decisions are difficult to observe. We combine Monero node measurements, Qubic pool observations, community-shared artifacts, and disclosed view keys to attribute blocks and identify candidate withholding periods. Rather than sustained majority control, we observe elevated orphaning and deeper reorganizations. Qubic did not follow a single optimized selfish mining strategy, instead varying between standard selfish mining and more defensive block-release decisions. Across the campaign, it gained no reward advantage over honest mining. Community monitoring and Qubic's countermeasures reveal how real-world mining campaigns evolve in response to an active ecosystem. Overall, the campaign disrupted Monero without exhibiting a stable profit-maximizing strategy, leaving open disruptive incentives beyond direct mining rewards.

Accepted at the 8th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2026)