Ahmad Shadid, the CEO of decentralized compute provider io.net, has responded to critics who had questioned the number of GPUs truly available on the platform with a detailed post-mortem claiming the network had been attacked by users attempting to spoof GPU availability in return for future rewards. 

"Like many startups, we move fast, and sometimes we break things. In this case, something broke, and someone or some group sought to exploit that," said Shadid, in his post on X. 

Shadid explained how the company became aware that users were increasingly spoofing GPUs in order to solicit rewards from the network in what Shadid characterized as a Sybil attack, or an attack on the nodes of a network. "Ten days ago, we saw an enormous spike of ~1.8M fake GPUs attempting to connect …