Vertcoin Experiences 51% Blockchain Network Attack as Coinbase Comments on it

An old player in the virtual currency market, Vertcoin, was attacked at 51% on December 2nd. An important number of ASIC miners began to extract this cryptocurrency. While virtual currency prices have declined over the last year, cryptocurrency networks are much more vulnerable to these attacks as the hash rate has also plummeted.

Although large networks like Bitcoin have not been attacked and are not vulnerable, smaller ones have already been attacked. Verge and Bitcoin Gold are two cryptos that have suffered this attack of 51%.

Vertcoin is a project related to the MIT Digital Currency Initiative and has worked on the implementation of Lightning Network (LN), a scaling solution for various virtual currencies.

The last attack of 51% up Vertcoin the network was sufficient to reorganize some transactions and create a double expense of over 300 blocks. According to Mark Nesbitt, a recognized engineer at Coinbase, these double expenses were worth nearly $ 100,000 on the network, which is now lost.

Apparently, the attacks appear to be aimed at exchanges to steal money from them. However, Vertcoin has a low volume on its trading pairs, which means that there is not so much money to be stolen from trading in this way. There are some reports that say these attacks have not been initiated for financial gains.

In a blog post, Mark Nesbitt did a thorough analysis of the attack event. Coinbase provides information on these attacks related to the financial impact they have had and details on their duration.

Beyond that, the engineer claimed that 51% attacks have significant implications on the "long queue" of cryptocurrency resources. By the way, Nesbitt wrote:

"There are a large number of cryptocurrencies, including many based on Bitcoin, which implement their own work-based blockchain tests, and industry observers have said that these activities have the same properties as Bitcoins, which has now been undeniably demonstrated empirically. as false. "

According to Coinbase, exchanges are in a very difficult situation when they face these attacks. The best thing they can do is to stop interacting with this resource and its blockchain. Furthermore, the cryptographic platform explains that the only way a resource can reduce the risk of being attacked by 51% is to be the dominant application of the hardware used to extract this resource.

The conclusion that Nesbitt wrote states that exchanges are an ideal target for these attacks. If exchanges continue to provide customers with assets in response to the deposit of a reversible currency, there will be no reason for the perpetrators to stop this malicious behavior.

The comments that have been given by Coinbase show that there is a very tough and competitive landscape in the foreign exchange sector. Exchanges like Binance or Bittrex have taken an important part of the market that was previously owned by Coinbase.

It seems that Coinbase wants to discredit exchanges that offer users the opportunity to exchange various goods. Coinbase has always been very strict with the number of assets traded on its platform. However, over the past six months, Coinbase has made the decision to add new trading pairs on its platform to remain a competitive platform. Exchanges like Binance have over 390 trading pairs.

Vertcoin is currently the 185th largest virtual currency with a market capitalization of $ 14.6 million and a price per coin of $ 0.31 dollars.