A critical vulnerability in the Dogecoin (DOGE/USD) network has caused a major disruption. In fact, 69% of its nodes went inactive. Surprisingly, this incident didn’t affect Dogecoin’s price much.
Andreas Kohl, co-founder of the Bitcoin sidechain Sequentia, claimed he exploited this flaw on December 12. He used a regular laptop in El Salvador to pull off the attack. Before the exploit, Blockchair reported 647 active Dogecoin nodes. Afterward, that number dropped to just 315.
Kohl revealed that he took advantage of a vulnerability discovered by researcher Tobias Ruck. This shows a serious weakness in the network’s resilience. An account on X, called “Department of DOGE Efficiency,” had warned about the “DogeReaper” vulnerability on December 4. This vulnerability causes the operating system to stop the program for safety, leading to the node’s crash.
The account cautioned, “If a malicious actor had discovered this bug instead of us, they could have stopped the Dogecoin network for several days. This would have halted transactions and block creation entirely.”
Despite the vulnerability, DOGE’s price remained stable. It traded around $0.4138, up 1.8% over the past 24 hours. Technical analyst Ali Martinez suggested that Dogecoin might be on the verge of a significant breakout.
Martinez, who has 97,000 followers on X, believes DOGE is entering a bull cycle similar to its previous surges in 2017 and 2021. He shared a chart showing that DOGE is currently within a large ascending channel, which matches historical bull market patterns.
Martinez said, “Check out where we are in the Dogecoin DOGE bull cycle! Very early, right?” He’s taking advantage of the dip by buying more DOGE in the $0.30–$0.40 range. His target? $3, with a speculative upper limit of $18 if the market rallies strongly.