Æternity developers recognize the critical role the crypto community is playing in ensuring the network’s security, stability and integrity, after thwarting several 51% attacks against the blockchain.
In a release official, the developers of Æternity, blockchain decentralized designed for scalability and enterprise use, praised the actions taken by its user community to thwart several 51% attacks which were carried out against the security of this network. According to the developers in the statement, entitled “A story of attack and recovery”, the rapid response of the crypto community at large, including mining pools and exchanges cryptocurrencies, , managed to stop the attacks against the network.
It appears that Æternity has been under attack for several months, with the last two estimated to have seen 3 large 51% attacks and 29 million Æ tokens lost, worth around $2,3 million at the time of writing. However, thanks to the coordination of the crypto community to thwart the attacks, all of the tokens were recovered.
From now on, the network developers indicate that they are working on the implementation of hyperchains that they use Bitcoin as the main chain to prevent this type of attacks in the future.
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The heroic response of the community
In April of last year, Tyler Winklevoss, one of the richest men in Bitcoin according to the magazine Forbes, claimed that organized communities, like those first seen in Bitcoin and Ethereum, have the potential to grow and consolidate a project that “has real promise and technical merit.” Winklevoss’ words were in reference to the unity demonstrated by a community of support for Chainlink, known as the LINK Marines, who defended the value of the LINK token to prevent its collapse at the time.
Similarly, the Æternity community’s feat in defending the network allowed it to prevail despite the attacks it was suffering. The blockchain developers described the community’s response to prevent the success of these attacks as “heroic.”
A series of threats against Æternity
The first attack on the network was carried out on December 5th last year. The developers explain that a group of miners, who controlled more than 51% of the network, began mining blocks for an unknown beneficiary, managing to extract 29 million Æ tokens. Upon realizing the situation, the Æternity Crypto Foundation development team agreed to include the address of the unknown beneficiary on a blacklist, in coordination with the exchanges and cryptocurrency exchanges that interact with the blockchain token.
Then, a month later, Æternity's Telegram community was hit by an attack, which locked and removed nearly 7.000 of the group's participants, only to suffer a further attack just days later. double-spending.
In the first week of January, an unknown miner secretly mined a chain to use the 29 million tokens stolen in the 51% attack executed in December. Although the attack was well coordinated, a member of the Æternity community noticed the problem and alerted the developers, who began taking joint actions with miners, exchanges and the crypto community in general, to thwart the attack. The result of these coordinated actions allowed the network to avoid the withdrawal of the compromised funds, recovering them in full.
The combined efforts of the community
As Æternity explains, during this latest attack miners and cryptocurrency exchanges were able to quickly create, launch and distribute emergency node software, which allowed them to transition from the attacker's fork to the legitimate Æternity community.
In addition to the software, a substantial number of community members began renting hashing power to mine on the community network and neutralize the attack. This set of actions invalidated the history of malicious transactions on the attacker's fork, and restored the original network.
As Æternity has been the victim of other attacks in the past, such as the multi-signature parity hack that occurred in 2017, in which over 80.000 ETH were affected, the network will now implement hyperchains; which are basically systems PoS (Proof of Stake) that depend on networks PoW (Proof of Work) existing blockchains, such as Bitcoin, for their security. This resource will allow Æternity to anchor itself to a high-level and secure blockchain network such as Bitcoin, while utilizing the full potential of PoS to improve the privacy and scalability of the entire network.
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