Ethereum Classic suffers third 51% attack on Saturday evening

The decentralized platform has been living one of its worth months on record with three dangerous 51% attacks that have led to the reorganization of around 4000 blocks for each of the first two and an unprecedented 7000 blocks yesterday in the evening.

Bitfly or ETC Labs, the leading organization behind Ethereum Classic Network, reported that this amounted to approximatively two days of mining. They also reported last week they would be implementing a strategy to protect the network from additional attacks that would use defensive mining to protect the catastrophically diminishing the hashrate of the network.

ETC Cooperative, another organisation working on Ethereum Classic has announced on Twitter that they are aware of the attack and are “working with others to test (…) solutions”.

OKEx, a major cryptocurrency exchange has already announced they were considering dropping the asset due to the lack of security protecting the network. Such a weakly protected asset might damage the reputation of the exchanges listing Ethereum Classic but also of crypto as a whole.

Coinbase has already taken measures to protect itself by extending deposit and withdrawal confirmation times for Ethereum Classic to around two weeks. While this provides ample time for Coinbase to react and prevent fraud, one has to wonder if the next logical step for one of the foremost exchanges in the world to delist the coin altogether.

Strangely enough, the price of the crypto itself has not been particularly affected by the recent attacks, as if either holders don’t care or know about the network’s fragility. In either cases, we don’t see this trend keeping in light of newer revelations to the public about these attacks.

While a slight dip can be seen over August, it does not seem particularly major compared to the gravity of these attacks and the potential threat to the network as a whole. As per wikipedia, Ethereum Classic still has almost half a million active users.

The flaws in the security Ethereum Classic have not yet been found to be fatal but they could severely damage its reputation. Strong defensive measures should be put into play very shortly.