Ethereum Successfully Evades Network Attack

The Ethereum ETH/USD blockchain successfully evaded a network attack on Tuesday.

What Happened: Marius Van Der Wijden, an Ethereum researcher and Go Ethereum software client developer, revealed the failed attack on Twitter.

Someone unsuccessfully tried to attack #ethereum today by publishing a long (~550) blocks which contained invalid pow's. Only a small percentage of @nethermindeth nodes switched to this invalid chain. All other clients rejected the long sidechain as invalid

— MariusVanDerWijden (@vdWijden) September 14, 2021

According to him, only a small percentage of nodes — roughly 0.8% of all ETH nodes — fell victim to the attack, which attempted to trick them into switching to an invalid chain.

“The chain has been overtaken in length by the good chain now and should be overtaken in difficulty soon. Also looks like the attacker is not mining further on his published invalid chain. Another great demonstration of how client diversity makes Ethereum stronger,” he noted.

At the time of writing, the main chain had also been overtaken in difficulty and all affected nodes reported back to the chain without the fake blocks. As a result, there was no immediate action required from node operators.

Incidentally, two other blockchains suffered a major outage on the same day.

Ethereum competitor Solana SOL/USD went offline because of a large increase in transaction load. Solana’s validators are currently working towards restarting the network.

Arbitrum, a layer 2 blockchain network, went offline for 45-minutes.

“Funds were never at risk, but the submission of new transactions stopped during the downtime,” said Arbitrum.

As of yesterday, the Total Value Locked (TVL) in Arbitrum exceeded $2 billion. The Ethereum scaling solution recently raised $120 million in funding from investors such as Mark Cuban, Redpoint Ventures, Pantera Capital and Alameda Research.

ETH Price Action: At publication Wednesday, Ethereum was trading at $3,382 after gaining 1.68% over the past 24-hours.

Photo: JJ Ying on Unsplash