Fee Spike on Ethereum Classic Raises Fears of More Exchange Attacks

A sudden surge in transaction fees on the ethereum classic blockchain has some developers speculating whether cryptocurrency exchanges could be at risk of attack, a development that follows last week's 51% attack in which more than $200,000 was stolen from at least one exchange.

Over the last 24 hours, average transaction fees on the blockchain rose to $6.10, up nearly 800 percent from $0.71 the day prior, the largest spike in transaction costs in the history of the blockchain according to data source BitInfoCharts.

Ethereum classic miners made as much as 844 ETC verifying transaction blocks Sunday, an unusual occurrence for the network that continues to run the original software instance of the ethereum project.

Starting as early at 11:15 AM Sunday, one user on the ethereum classic Discord channel reported a near doubling of the hash power, or total computer power, being put toward verifying transactions and mining new blocks, a figure corroborated on blockchain analytics sites such as CoinWarz.

Another data source, GasTracker, said ethereum classic mining pool 2miners accounted for a large majority of the additional hashrate hitting up to 3,054.29 GH/s from a rough average shortly beforehand of 160 GH/s. Though no one is able to identify who exactly is sending transactions with such high fees, there is speculation over this individual's motives.

Tweeting out a link identifying a known vulnerability in ethereum gas tokens, Burns posits that the sender of these transactions is looking to take advantage a loophole that enables gas token creation through exchanges free of cost.

"An exploit was found a few months ago where exchanges were paying [gas] for the exchange withdrawal. Unknown users were using this to withdraw and minting gas tokens for free [by] having the exchanges pay large amounts of gas."

The ethereum classic community is still left with many questions to answer after events last week caused massive block reorganizations.

On an optimistic note, exchange Gate.io reported this weekend that about half of the money lost was returned.

After having raised block confirmation times to 500 last Tuesday, the confirmation number now is 4,000 indicating a significantly longer wait period for users sending ethereum classic funds through the exchange.