Coinbase Managed To Dodge The $9M ETC 51% Attack And Here’s How

Coinbase managed to avoid the latest $9 million Ethereum Classic 51% attacks in their new report where they outline how this impacted their system so let’s find out in the Coinbase news today.

Coinbase managed to dodge the attacks as they detailed in their analysis of the 51% attack against the Ethereum Classic blockchain. The exchange was running multiple ETC node clients during the attack and saw the impact of the fork of these systems. They are taking some legal action right now against the attackers.

Coinbase released a report explaining what went on during the recent ETC 51% attack. The leading cryptocurrency and custody platform released a report on the Ethereum Classic double-spending attack that happened at the start of August in which they calculated that about $9 million in assets got stolen from crypto exchanges. Coinbase confirmed that it was not the target of the transactions and there were no funds affected.

The two separate 51% attacks were organized against Ethereum Classic which is a proof of work blockchain with a market cap of more than $770 million. The attacker managed to send millions worth of coins to OKEX and Bitfinex crypto exchanges and then they swapped the cons for other currencies, thus removing them from the exchange. Using rented hash power bigger than 51% of all the other miners combined the attacker erased the transactions sending ETC to exchanges by allowing them to retain both the swapped assets and the original ETC.

Coinbase noted that the Ethereum Classic blockchain forked into two chains based on how different ETC node clients parse blockchain data. Some of the nods run in a “pruned state” where the blocks beyond a certain age are considered “ancient” and not stored within the node. In this case, the 51% attack tried to replace the blocks that are becoming ancient which caused the pruned nodes to stick with the original data. As an administrator of multiple different crypto assets, Coinbase runs a variety of different nodes and clients for a lot of blockchains which helps the company realize that there was something off at the very beginning.

This is how Coinbase managed to dodge the attacks as per the reports:

“Coinbase chose to significantly raise our confirmation count requirement. This ensured that no double-spend transactions were credited on the Coinbase platform.”