Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson recently revisited the "poisoning transaction" incident that occurred in November last year, which caused a chain split due to a security vulnerability.

Hostkinson admitted that when discussing how to respond to this incident, the most challenging part was not the technical fix but the subsequent compensation issue. "We need to find a way to compensate those affected users, but it's complicated — they didn't really do anything wrong, they just followed the protocol rules, and the nodes they run are all functioning normally."

This incident highlights that even in mature blockchain networks, unforeseen protocol vulnerabilities can still trigger chain reactions. When transaction data is tampered with, verification discrepancies among different nodes can ultimately lead to network splits — a severe test for any distributed system.

The Cardano team subsequently released a patch to fix this vulnerability, but the "poisoning transaction" incident also serves as a reminder to the entire industry: even audited mainnets need to reserve contingency plans and user protection mechanisms for extreme scenarios.