Ethereum Classic network faced a double 51% attack on its platform in the month of January which led to a loss of $1 million. The attackers were able to accumulate 51% of the hash power required to manipulate the network and continued the attack for several days. The attackers used their control on the ETC blockchain to manipulate a series of deposits on several cryptocurrency exchanges by reversing them. As a result of the attack, Coinbase had to halt ETC trading on its platform.

The developers on the ETC blockchain has come up with the Astor testnet based on ECIP-1059 in response to the 51% attack on the network. The Astor testnet make use of SHA3 or Keccack256 cryptographic signature, as it is a Proof-of-Work [PoW] method. The official Twitter handle for ETC also released a statement on the release of the testnet.

How Would the New Astor Testenet Help in Avoiding 51% Attack in Future

Astor Testnet which leverages ECIP-1059 can recognize the need of the network to branch out from the similar algorithm used by its forked sibling Ethereum (ETH). The importance of ECIP-1059 was explained by Alex Tsankov, DApp Direct’s operator in the blog post. The blog went on to talk about the transparency in the hashing algorithm of the network and noted that the use of SHA3 protocol would promote equal opportunity to the miners around the globe.

Although Proof-of-work consensus is known to prefer those miners who have better and more powerful mining equipment, the community believes that the latest protocol would promote equality in the mining community. SHA3 has been designed by the Keccak team and being touted as a

“safer block production,”

by many.

Tsankov seems to be a big fan of SHA3 as he tweeted,

“SHA3 Mining on Astor Testnet has begun! My 2 CPU miners are currently putting out a combined 435,000 hashes per second. A remarkable performance from SHA3 – a true mark of quality.”

At the time of writing, the average block time for the ETC network stood at 38.80 seconds, and the average network hashrate was at 434.5 KH/s, with the difficulty at 16.84 MH.