CORE drops 19.5% as Core DAO hard fork halts exchange withdrawals

Core DAO is coordinating an emergency hard fork after a small group of validators drew CORE rewards above the protocol's intended issuance, a fault that pushed several trading venues to freeze deposits and withdrawals on the network and left the token down 19.5 percent over seven days to $0.0205 as of 14:38 UTC on Sept. 2.

"Malicious validators can no longer obtain additional rewards through the issue," Core said in an update on X, adding that the incident had been contained and that user assets were not at risk. The project earlier described the problem as limited to reward issuance, and said the planned upgrade would apply prospectively, leaving the blockchain and all previously confirmed transactions unchanged.

The first publicly dated freeze came from Coinbase, whose status page carries the entry "Paused Sends/Receives - Core DAO Network" with a timestamp of 30 Aug. 2026, 21:41 Pacific Time, or 4:41 UTC on Aug. 31. The entry still lists the status as "Investigating." South Korean venues Bithumb and Coinone suspended CORE deposits and withdrawals citing security concerns, while Bitget restricted both under the heading of wallet maintenance and LBank halted deposits at the project's request. Coinbase said buying, selling, conversions and euro or dollar payments were unaffected, a distinction that matters because a venue can keep trading running in its own books while blocking the route onto the chain.

Independent measurement of the Core mainnet, queried via the public interface at rpc.coredao.org on Sept. 2, dates the anomaly to two validator addresses that entered block production on Aug. 28 and built their last blocks on Aug. 31 at 5:50 UTC. The set of block-producing addresses rose from 21 to 23 on Aug. 28 and fell back to 21 on Aug. 31, with the two additions — 0x6e1f9471…3d7a28 and 0x9c7c39f1…50bb70 — entering twelve seconds apart and leaving twelve seconds apart after producing 93,154 blocks between them. The 21 addresses active before and after the window are identical, meaning no validators were swapped out.

The chain never halted during the episode. Across 4,619 block intervals counted in the window from 5:00 to 9:00 UTC on Aug. 31, the longest gap was five seconds, with 4,119 intervals at three seconds and 455 at four. The network fell 181 blocks short of its otherwise exact cadence — 1,200 per hour at a mean interval of 3.001 seconds — with the shortfall spread across four hours beginning in the same hour the two addresses stopped producing. The freeze was at the trading venues, not on the chain.

Core has not disclosed how much CORE was issued in excess, how long the activity persisted, or whether any of the additional tokens reached circulation. It also has not explained the vulnerability that let the validators collect the rewards, nor named an activation block or a date for the fork. The project said it would publish a technical postmortem, without a date. Fee data read from the blocks shows nothing conspicuous: the two additional addresses accounted for 0.4594 CORE from 150 blocks and 0.6091 CORE from 152 blocks, at the bottom of a field whose highest producer drew 1.7970 CORE from 155 blocks, suggesting the excess arose in system contracts rather than per-block fee transfers.

For CORE holders the fork is a forward upgrade, so confirmed transactions stand and a self-custodied balance does not disappear. The open questions are the timing of activation and whether the excess issuance, if it reached circulation, adds to token supply. Until Core names a block or a time, the sensible posture for holders on affected venues is to wait, since no detour via another chain helps while a provider has halted the network as a whole.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.