Latest news from the Ethereum Classic (ETC) community indicate that the ETC Labs Core development team has created a new alert system to detect threats on the network. The twitter announcement by @Eth_Classic went on to state that the new system is based on block analysis and propagation patterns. The surveillance system will prevent any future attacks on the blockchain such as the recent 51% attack on ETC. The tweet making the announcement can be found below.

The new ETC network monitoring and alert system created by @ETCLabsCore shows the level of threat based on block analysis and block propagation patterns. Ethereum Classic (ETC) Introduces Alert System https://t.co/CVuxQxoC8h — Ethereum Classic (@eth_classic) January 29, 2019

Why Develop an Alert System

Earlier this month, the ETC blockchain fell victim to a 51% attack. The team at Coinbase was one of the first to detect the anomaly on the network. They managed to pause movement of the double spent funds on the ETC blockchain. They issued an announcement on the 7th of January that stated the following:

On 1/5/2019, Coinbase detected a deep chain reorganization of the Ethereum Classic blockchain. In order to protect customer funds, we immediately paused interactions with the ETC blockchain.

Updated Jan. 7, 10:27pm PT: At time of writing, we have identified a total of 15 reorganizations, 12 of which contained double spends, totaling 219,500 ETC (~$1.1M). No Coinbase accounts have been impacted by the attack.

What Exactly is a 51% Attack?

A 51% attack on a Proof-of-Work powered blockchain involves a group of miners controlling more than 50% of a it’s mining hashrate. With majority control on the network, they can send funds to one address on the main chain of the network while sending similar funds to another address on a forked copy of the blockchain that they are also secretly mining.

Other nodes who are still processing the main chain will see the first transactions as valid. The malicious miners then release the silently mined blocks on the second chain and other nodes will accept this as the new correct chain since it is longer. The original transaction will disappear and nodes will now recognize the funds from the new chain thus creating a double spend situation.

About ETC Labs Core

Officially launched mid this month, ETC Labs Core is the new core development tram at ETC labs. The new team will focus on core ETC projects, supporting the blockchain, providing tooling for DApp development, mining and other services required. As part of their mission, the team values state immutability, decentralization, and backward compatibility.

The announcement introducing the new team also provided a new ETC roadmap for 2019. A summarized version of the roadmap and areas of focus in 2019 can be found below.

ETH Compatibility ECIP-1045 (Byz + Const HF) Q1 2019

Classic Geth Q1-Q2 2019

Multi-Geth Q1-Q4 2019

ETH Compatibility Q1 2019

Embedded SVM Q1 2019

ETC JIT Compiler Q1 — Q3 2019

EVM LLVM Backend Q2 — Q4 2019

Chain Monitoring & Analysis Tooling ASAP 2019

Emerald SDK, IPFS and Multi-geth support: to be announced

JSON RPC Schema ~Q1 — Q2 2019

Service Runner ~Q1 — Q2 2019

DApp Deployment Tool Q2 2019

Multi-network Explorer Q2 — Q3 2019

Smart Contract IDE Q3 — Q4

Documentation ~Q1 2019

Dev Tutorials and Guides Q1 — Q4

UX/ UI Research

DApp Prototyping

What are your thoughts on the new alert system on the Ethereum Classice network to detect attacks? Is it a step in the right direction for all Proof-of-Work networks? Please let us know in the comments section below.

[Image courtesy of Unsplash.com]

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