ETC Labs Creates Defensive Mining Strategy As Hashrate Drops

ETC Labs creates a new plan for the “Defensive Mining” strategy as the Ethereum classic hashrate dropped since January and continues to do so after the successful 51% attacks on the network. ETC labs create a new strategy to protect the network and revitalize it according to a blog post that we are reading more about in our Ethereum Classic crypto news.

Ethereum Classic Labs, the “stewards” of the blockchain, detailed a new plan to protect the network from future attacks as per their blog post. The current hashrate of ETC is about 3.2 terahash per second which means is down by 74% from the start of the year and 84% down from its all-time high of 20.4 terahash per second that was set in January. The downwards trend continued after the two 51% attacks at the start of August.

The first attack occurred on August 1 and it was initially mistaken as a miner software malfunction. Five days later, there was another 51% attack launched and both of the attacks reorganized more than 3000 blocks on the ETC chain. As a part of the attack prevention plan, ETC Labs plans to implement a defensive mining strategy by cooperating with miners and the mining pools with one of the goals being to “maintain a more consistent hash rate.”

There are still no chances to learn about the details of the defensive mining strategy as they remain confidential for now according to Terry Culver, the CEO of Ethereum Classic Labs. Regardless of how the defensive mining is implemented, protecting the Ethereum Classic ecosystem seems to be in an uphill battle after the major crypto exchange Coinbase extended the ETC confirmation times to two weeks after OKEx said it will consider delisting the cryptocurrency.

The defensive mining strategy will be forced to compete against the Ethereum mining profitability according to Thomas Heller who was a director at the mining company F2Pool. Heller said that Profitability is the only angle miners care about and whether ETC labs have the funds to sustain profitability is a really important issue. Miners will choose to mine ether if it’s more profitable than defensive mining for ETC. Since the attacks, the price of the coin was barely moved and traded at $6.83 which is about 3% below the price on the day of the second attack.