You may remember hearing about the recent 51% attack which hit the Ethereum Classic blockchain at the beginning of January 2019. Well, in a bizarre turn of events, it would seem that the attacker, for whatever reason, has had a change of heart and returned a significant amount of ETC tokens.

If you are not up to date on what a 51% attack is, the basic gist of it is that it is a type of hack performed on a blockchain network. It relies on one user being able to acquire more than half of the entire network’s computing power, hence the name, and then using it to essentially take control of the entire network.

The case of the returned funds

As mentioned, a statement issued by Gate.io on January 12th 2019 mentioned that they had received roughly $100k in ETC from a person the suspected to be the attacker and were attempting to, although they had not had such joy yet.

The statement from Gate.io also went on to theorise that the attacker may have been a white-hat attacker who was simply executing a vulnerability they had discovered in order to see it patched before someone else exploited it.

Whatever the case I would expect those who lost their funds to have them back by now and, if not, I would expect they will receive them soon.

Happiness.