The exchange says $ 200K in Ethereum Classic lost as blockchain attacks Continue

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The cryptocurrency Gate.io said Tuesday that it will absorb the $ 200,000 loss of the classic ethereum – about 40,000 ETCs – in light of a series of blockchain rewritings that continue to occur.

In a blog post, the exchange claimed to have confirmed the 51% attack – whereby an entity controls enough computing power to change the transaction history of the network and double coins expense – and identified three addresses that are said to be related to the attacker in question.

"The Gate.io censor successfully blocked the attackers' transactions at the beginning and subjected them to manual examination, but unfortunately, during the 51% attack, all transactions seemed valid and confirmed. well on the blockchain.The examiner passed the transactions.This attack caused a loss of about 40k ETC. Gate.io will take all losses for the users, "said the exchange in his statement. The price for ETC printing is $ 4.97 per token, according to CoinMarketCap.

The announcement corroborates similar claims made by the cryptographic exchange of Coinbase, which said it had identified double expenses incurred as a result of deep reorganization of blocks (reorg) on ​​the classic block of ethereum.

The information shared by Bitfly (Etherchain), Coinbase and Blockscout indicates that the attacks continue. "We updated our blog last night with further attacks, and we will not resume ETC communications / receipts until we feel it is safe to do so," said a Coinbase representative.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Peter Pratscher, managing director of Bitfly, explained that although a number of reorganized blocks could be confirmed on the classic ethereum network, it was not possible to ascertain from them any analysis of the transaction movement to confirm or deny double expenses.

On the other hand, the Blockscout project has led Andrew Cravenho to CoinDesk that the evidence of a double spend attack is "100%".

Indicating a reorg occurred between block number 7261495 and 7261496 on the classic ethereum blockchain, Cravenho reported that 26,000 ETCs were spent once before the reorg occurred on block number 7261492 and then again on block number 7261497.

"This double-shopping operation was actually stolen," said Cravenho. He also added that while it is still possible that the event may have been caused by an accident due to specialized mining hardware testing, as suggested yesterday in the official Twitter page of Ethereum Classic, the probability of this is subtle .

"If I was testing the new hardware, I would not test $ 100,000 in a single transaction," Cravenho joked.

Developer efforts

Some developers of the classical ethereum community have come publicly to agree with the analysis of Blockscout, including developer Donald McIntyre, who told CoinDesk: "The last piece of information I have is that there has been no attack from any ASICs provider but a 51% textbook and double-expense attack "At the same time, not all classic ethereum developers are in agreement.

The developer of Ethereum, Cody Burns, said that a clear picture of what is happening on the classic ethereum network has not yet been discovered, refusing to comment when asked what the cause of these reorg attacks is.

And speaking of proactive steps to ensure network security, Burns told CoinDesk that developers are proceeding with caution.

He told CoinDesk:

"We discussed options [to] mitigate the current threat, but nobody wants to make a hasty decision that exposes more threats to security. "

Adding to this, McIntyre went so far as to suggest provisional steps "to decide if an urgent PoW algorithm changes in ETC" is needed in the short term and "adjusts the changes to the client or protocol for example a reorg cap per miner" in the longest.

However, given the decentralized form of governance that oversees the relatively nascent blockchain network, McIntyre concludes that the coordination between the classic ethereum developers remains unformalized.

"Because we are truly decentralized, we have no formal processes or top-down management of our network, communications or decision-making process, but we coordinate and share the same incentives to support the network, so we communicate regularly, though not with the method or [system] of a centralized team, "said McIntyre.

Image of the magnifying glass through Shutterstock

Nik De and Rachel Rose O & # 39; Leary contributed to the report.

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