Cardano experienced a brief chain split on Friday due to an old code vulnerability, which went unnoticed possibly due to its "dormant" nature.

BlockBeats News, November 23rd, according to Cointelegraph's report, due to a "format error" in a delegation transaction, the Cardano network experienced a temporary chain split on Friday. Such delegation transactions refer to transactions delegating ADA to a staking pool, which although valid at the protocol level, can potentially lead to a code fault that affects network functionality.

According to an incident report released by the Cardano ecosystem organization Intersect, this "format error" transaction exploited an old code vulnerability in the Cardano blockchain's underlying software library, causing nodes to diverge in transaction processing, ultimately resulting in a network split. This vulnerability was caused by a staking pool operator named Homer J, who used AI-generated code to drive the transaction and has admitted responsibility for the network split. The staking pool operator was required to download the latest version of the node software to fix the issue and reintegrate the split chain into a single, coherent blockchain.

This temporary split has sparked debate within the Cardano community, with some believing that Homer J's actions helped expose a critical flaw, while others, such as Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, have referred to it as an attack on the Cardano network, with the FBI intervening in the investigation. One user sarcastically remarked, "No one noticed the Cardano network partition because no one uses it."