The objective is to provide an effective warning system to prevent violations such as the 51% attack occurred in early January
The ETC Cooperative development team, created to financially support the growth and development of Ethereum Classic (ETC), announced a new tool called etcstatus.live, which will allow monitoring the behavior of ETC’s blockchain. This was reported by the team through a tweet published in its official account, this Thursday, January 17th.
With this function, users will be able to know when the system may be being violated, according to the colors the page shows. Among which are yellow and red, depending on the severity or risk.
The publication by ETC Cooperative explains that the new tool for the ETC network represents an immediate warning system for the community of users and developers that will alert about any anomaly in it. This follows the attack of 51% suffered by the chain at the beginning of January this year.
Software developer GitHub described this tool as “a rudimentary collection of bash scripts to collect and analyze blockchain client metrics, providing basic warning mechanisms for anomalous situations and events”.
The Procedure
The ETC Cooperative team explained that etcstatus.live works in a similar way to rudimentary warning systems, as in email: “The focus is on its ability to activate rudimentary alert systems, such as email, based on heuristics for the anomalous or erroneous behavior in the chain. Its design aims to minimize specialized dependencies and focus on providing simple and generic text-based datasets and analyzes”.
In this way, when there is an anomalous pattern in the chain’s block generation, the colors shown on the page are transformed into yellow, orange or red according to the severity of the anomaly in the record.
Among the consequences of the attack on the Ethereum Classic network, on January 7th, the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange stopped its Ethereum transactions as a result of an abnormal activity in the chain of blocks, which detected that 88,500 ETC (about US $ 460,000) had been spent twice.
The fact generated reactions among the members of the community, who feared for the security of their investments. A few days later it was announced that the attacker of 51 percent returned US $ 100,000 in cryptocurrencies to Gate.io.
Because this money was returned, many considered this attack “non-profit”. According to some users, the intention would be to remind community members of the vulnerability that exists so far in the platform and the need to improve security in the network or improve protection mechanisms, so as not to affect to those who make transactions.
There are other similar services to follow the state of the network as well as the mining power of the mining participants. In fact, during the attack suffered by the network, GasTracker became the main source of data to track the performance of the malicious that attacked ETC.
In this way, the network’s members were able to monitor the mining power concentrated by the attackers as well as the amount of mined blocks and the rewards obtained. The etcstatus.live platform allows knowing the current state of the mined blocks, making a study of the last 300 blocks and offering a report on the network’s state and the diversity of mining origins of these blocks.
ETCC published a tweet about the tool this January 17th, where it assure the project is already operational, and “tracking the status of the ETC network and pointing out anomalies”.
By María Rodríguez
