The attack took place on 7 January 2019 and researchers at Gate.io said the hacker swindled a total of 54,200 ETC, worth approximately $250,816,191 at the time of the press. Gate.io also presented three ETC wallet addresses allegedly used by the hacker, while requesting other cryptocurrency exchanges to freeze any transaction from the suspicious addresses.
Gate.io, which guaranteed to reimburse the losses faced by its customers, announced that they received $100k of ETC from the perpetrator. Neither do they know the reason for the partial refund, nor do they have heard anything from the hacker.
Gate.io said “We found that the recent ETC 51% attacker returned 100k USD value of ETC back to Gate.io. We were trying to contact the attacker but we haven’t got any reply until now.”
According to Gate.io, if the perpetrator does not attempt to make the profit, then it is remotely possible that he is a white hacker who just actually wanted to grab people’s attention to the underpinning risks of “blockchain consensus and hacking power security.”
This could be probably be true because researchers at Gate.io believe that the “hacking power “ of ETC blockchain is not strong enough and hackers could easily rent the requisite hashing power for another 51% attack.
However, the exchange upped the number of ETC confirmations from 500 to 4000 in order to improve its 51% security feature against potential attacks.
As reported earlier, the US-based crypto exchange Coinbase had a completely different story, asserting that it discovered 88,500 ETC ($410k at press time) in double expenditure and chains. The ETC team refuses to accept, however, that it was a 51% assault and claims that no double spending was found.