Someone Is Mining Empty Blocks on the Electroneum Network

There are always changes taking place in the world of cryptocurrency. Not all of those trends are particularly positive, though. It seems the Electroneum network suffered a major DDoS attack on Sunday, which may have allowed some people to double spend transactions.

What is Going on With Electronium?

In the world of Bitcoin and altcoins, there are always entities looking to take advantage of any given situation. In a lot of cases, these criminals will look for smaller-cap cryptocurrencies and try to quickly influence the networks. For Electroneum users, such an attack seemingly materialized over the weekend, as the network struggled quite a bit.

It seems that something was wrong with the Electroneum network for several hours. Whether or not this was a genuine attack or just a split chain is still unknown at this point in time. We did see the network generate a ton of empty blocks, and some of them were still being mined at the time of writing. This type of thing can easily cripple a network, as transactions are neither broadcast nor processed properly until things go back to normal.

To make matters worse, the Electroneum mining pools were behind the network by up to forty minutes at one point. This further hints that something nefarious was going on, although there could still have been many reasons for this particular development. Until the Electroneum team explains what was going on and how they plan to ensure it will not happen again, many people will assume the worst.

One obvious result of this attack on the Electroneum network is that the altcoin’s mempool quickly started growing in size. More specifically, the ETN mempool reached a size of just over 20MB at one point, which is a lot higher compared to what one usually sees when it comes to alternative cryptocurrencies. This development was especially intriguing given that the general feeling in cryptocurrency circles is that no one really uses ETN other than to send it to exchanges.

Whether or not this attack will be addressed in a constructive manner remains to be seen. Altcoins can easily be brought to their knees when attacks like these occur. Even Ethereum’s network grinds to a halt when there is an influx of transactions. In the case of Bitcoin, mining empty blocks has been a problem in the past as well. That’s been mainly due to Bitmain mining these empty blocks on purpose simply because it can.

For the time being, we will have to wait and see how this situation evolves. Things are not looking good for Electroneum, as there doesn’t appear to be any incentive to attack this altcoin’s network. It’s not the most popular currency, and it has low trading volume numbers overall. We can only hope the developers address this situation properly at some point.