Members of the Ethereum Classic team reported that the network suffered a reorganization (reorg) today.
The blockchain network is asking service providers to halt deposits while it carries out maintenance of the chain.
The latest event follows a similar attack in January 2019, which led to some exchanges taking pre-emptive action.
Both Ethereum Classic (ETC) and one of the founders have since put out a statement acknowledging this event which they term a chain split. ETC suffered a reorganization (reorg) of approximately 3,693 ETC blocks which occurred at block 10,904,146.
According to a report by Ethereum Classic team members, “there was about 3000 block-insertion by a miner who was mining (either offline or there total difficulty could have exceeded current network difficulty while they were honestly mining) for about 12 hours on Core-Geth.”
In a short prognosis of the chain split, Ethereum Classic developers say it has identified the offending miner. The network maintainers added they doubt any major double-spend attacks occurred. Even though the miner was identified, it is uncertain whether or not it was a malicious 51% attack that caused the reorg. Developer James Wo claims it was “not a 51% attack” and stressed “a miner went offline and was using old client software.”
In the diagnosis, Ethereum Classic developers said:
It could be that the offending miner has lost access to internet access for a while when mining, which led to a 12 hour mining period and about 3,000 blocks inserted. On the first 2,000 blocks, there was 1 miner and a total of 5 transactions. It also seems that the offending miner has uncled their own blocks by how fast they were mining.
Nice