VeriCoin team responds to MintPal breach by issuing hard fork

With the news of roughly 30% of the total supply of VeriCoins stolen from Mintpal earlier today, the VeriCoin team has responded with a statement describing a hard fork to invalidate all transactions since the breach occurred.

In the best interest of VeriCoin, we have decided to revert the blockchain to a state immediately before the attack.  This is not to protect MintPal from losses but rather to prevent a single entity from controlling 30% of the total supply, and to protect the VeriCoin users. Due to the way Proof of Stake operates, this quantity of coin could potentially attack the blockchain. To be clear, the coins that are on the Mintpal exchange are not owned by Mintpal but rather VeriCoins owned by users.

The VeriCoin team further goes on to describe two scenarios for VeriCoin investors on how this will impact them:

I. Your VeriCoins were stored in the VeriCoin wallet since 2AM EST 7/13/14
1. You are completely unaffected by this breach. Staking your VeriCoin in the wallet is the best decentralized solution.

II. Your VeriCoin was in an exchange after 2AM EST 7/13/14
A. In the best interest of VeriCoin Investors, the solution is to have the theft reversed. This is being done to preserve decentralization of the blockchain due to the number of coins that were stolen.
1. Reversal of the theft is done by pin-pointing when the breach in Mintpal’s security system occurred and forking the blockchain prior to that point.
a) Reversal of the blockchain is not the preferred action but it vastly minimizes the loss to the VeriCoin investors.
2. Mintpal will be reimbursing other exchanges and VeriCoin traders on their exchange for any transactions that were made and lost since 2AM EST 7/13/14 due to the theft reversal process.
a) Mintpal will be going through each individual transaction line by line and compiling a list of addresses to reimburse the VeriCoin investors.

b) This process will take time. Contact Mintpal or the exchange that you were using to trade VeriCoin with any questions or concerns.

(1) Mintpal will be reimbursing their traders and will be reimbursing other exchanges so that those exchanges can reimburse their traders as well.
(2) This is the Mintpal support link: https://support.mintpal.com/index.php?module=tickets&sec=submit.step2&department=1

A full link to the VeriCoin statement can be found here.