What’s Reorg Attack in Smart Contracts?
Learn what’s reorganization attack in very simple terms
Here’s what reorg means in smart contract.
Imagine miners mined two blocks at the same time. It happens.
Remember, there is some time interval between blocks. Bitcoin blockchain takes 10 minutes to create a new block. Ethereum takes around 14 seconds.
Eventually, miners would take one block of the two blocks and build other transactions (blocks) on it. Miners then abandon the second block. This is called reorganization — reorg for short.
Different factors can cause reorg. Network failure is one. In March 2022, Polygon network went to sleep for 11 good hours! Ethereum suffered the same blow for over an hour earlier this year.
In history, the Bitcoin network has gone down two times. And Solana? It is a regular customer of the network outage.
How does the reorg attack relate to the above?
Here’s the reorg attack
Imagine you have banks in different neighbourhoods that give out loans to people without interest.
Let’s call the neighbourhoods Polygon, Ethereum, and Optimism. These neighbourhoods have reorg problems — network failure. There are times…
