The main supporter of the Ethereum Classic blockchain, Ethereum Classic Labs, has revealed its plan to protect the blockchain network from frequent 51% attacks.
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The company announced two stages of improvement: immediate attack prevention and proposed long-term fixes.
The immediate attack prevention stage includes defensive cryptocurrency mining through cooperation with miners and mining pools in order to stabilize hash rate and to increase it when needed.
The company also suggests enhancing of network monitoring to identify anomalies and spikes in hash rate inventory and prices on mining pools. To reduce deposit/withdrawal confirmation times, Ethereum Classic Labs wants to enter into a close coordination with cryptocurrency exchanges on whitelisting addresses.
In the longer term, Ethereum Classic Labs says it might change the proof-of-work mining algorithm. Currently, there are only two alternatives under consideration: Keccak-256, or RandomX.
"These could be implemented through a hard fork in approximately 6 months, provided that testing is completed successfully," the company said.
The developers plan to implement some of the above-mentioned steps within the next 3 months. Even though there are no guarantee these steps would 100% protect the network from possible attacks, they would be part of a series of upgrades on ETC.
At the beginning of August, the blockchain network of Ethereum Classic suffered several 51% attacks in a week.
Cryptocurrency exchange OKEx claimed it had suffered a loss of approximately $5.6 million in ETC as a result of the attacks.
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