Huobi’s Proprietary Risk Control Infrastructure Protects Users Against BSV Attack

On Tuesday this week, the crypto markets were stunned by the malicious 51% attack of BSV, the hard fork of the Bitcoin Cash Network (BCH) that was created in November 2017. While many crypto exchanges were caught unawares by the attack, Huobi was not. Thanks to its advanced risk control systems, Huobi had predicted a month ago there was a risk that BSV could be attacked and was taking measures to protect its users.

On July 1, Huobi announced its risk control department had discovered BSV's current mainnet computing power was unstable and suspected someone was preparing for the next double-spend attack. Due to the upgrade of the BSV wallet, it was suspending the BSV withdrawal business.

As predicted, at around 11:45 p.m. Singapore time on Aug. 3, the BSV network suffered a malicious 51% attack, resulting in the reorganization of 14 blocks. The attack caused chaos in the mining pool and the blocks were generated simultaneously on three fork chains. Huobi succeeded in protecting the security of users’ assets due to the effective measures taken in advance.

Huobi was the first exchange trading platform to discover the BSV risks and take control measures, one month earlier than Coinbase. This is due to its eight years of safe operations – built on the world's top risk control team and capabilities – during which time it has maintained the best exchange security record.

“On July 1, we were concerned about the abnormality of BSV’s mainnet and suspected that someone was preparing for an attack,” says Ciara Sun, vice president of Huobi Global Market. “So, we suspended the deposit and withdrawal of BSV. We predicted this through our risk control model. The successful prediction of this attack was due to our eight years’ experience in risk control.”

This was not the first time that a 51% attack had been anticipated by Huobi’s risk systems. In December 2020, the old public chain Aeternity (AE), known as the European Ethereum, suffered a 51% attack and lost more than 39 million tokens valued at over $5 million. Numerous first-tier exchanges were victims and suffered heavy losses. But not Huobi. As in the BSV case, Huobi was the first exchange to discover these anomalies and put risk mitigants in place before the attack.

Insights from experience

Huobi Group is licensed for digital asset services in many countries and regions around the globe. It is one of the world’s leading digital asset trading platforms providing trading and related services for hundreds of digital assets.

Huobi’s long pedigree, global footprint, dedication to security and professionalism has made it a venue of choice for crypto traders around the world. As a result, it has attracted huge volumes, averaging over $20 billion in volume every day via 375 different crypto assets. This combination of volumes, experience and risk focus are the bedrock of the business and led to it successfully navigating through this week’s BSV attacks.