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Binance Commences Trading For XRP And ETC Coin-Margined Perpetual Contracts

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Malta-based exchange of crypto-currency, Binance was launched in 2017 only three years ago. Despite a little late entering the crypto market, the exchange was quick enough to establish its position in the crypto-verse. Binance is currently the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. The exchange never fails to roll out new updates for its users and the platform. Despite being subject to several scandals, Binance continued to retain its position on the top. Earlier today, the exchange launched coin-margined perpetual contracts for two popular coins.

XRP And ETC Join The List

At 7:00 AM [UTC], Binance commenced trading services for coin-margined perpetual contracts for the coins XRP and Ethereum Classic [ETC]. Users would be allowed to leverage the coins within the range of 1-75x. The aforementioned coins would be paired against the United States Dollar [USD]. Binance made the announcement via a blog post and suggested,

“The XRPUSD and ETCUSD coin-margined perpetual contracts are futures contracts that use base assets i.e. XRP and ETC as collaterals.”

The Changpeng Zhao-led exchange recently rolled out the coin-margined perpetual contracts feature along with USDT-margined futures. Back in August, CEO CZ revealed that the volume of both Coin-margined, as well as USDT-margined futures, reportedly went up to a high of $13 billion.

While XRP and ETC are the latest additions to the list, Bitcoin [BTC], Ether [ETH], Chainlink [LINK], Binance Coin [BNB], Tron [TRX], Cardano [ADA] along with Polkadot [DOT] have been part of coin-margined perpetual futures. Even though the “Order Price Cap Ratio” for every coin is 5% the leverage for Bitcoin ranges from 1x to 125x while the leverage of altcoins is limited from 1x to 75x.

The crypto community seemed to be happy with the exchange’s latest additions, however, some of them pointed out that rolling out ETC futures would be a mistake citing the series of 51% attacks the network has endured in the past month. Twitter user, @simonadams19821 said,

“Are you seriously launching etc futures with the network constantly being attacked wow talk about irresponsible @cz_binance I urge you to reconsider this.”

Additionally, the price of Ethereum Classic [ETC] seems to have taken a hit post the 51% attacks. During the time of writing, the altcoin was trading at a low of $5.07 with a 1.39% plummet in its price over the last 24-hours.

ETC Labs Proposes Inclusion Of Law Enforcement To Prevent 51% Attacks

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The crypto-verse is not new to hacks and attacks, however, the Ethereum Classic network endured an array of 51% attacks over the last month. The most recent attack took place just two days ago which initiated the reorganization of over 7,000 blocks on the network or about two days’ worth of mining. In the light of the last three attacks, the Ethereum Classic Labs have decided to step up by launching a new strategy that includes law enforcement and regulators from all across the globe.

Law Enforcement To Protect The Ethereum Classic Network

While Ethereum Classic Labs aka ETC Labs has an investigation underway to probe the roots of the latest attack, the previous attacks have led to the initiation of the platform’s decision to bring in the big guns. Back on 30 July and 1 August 2020, the Ethereum Classic network underwent a 51 percent attack following the purchase of hash rates from Nice Hash. Previously this company had been swimming in troubled waters after losing around $62 million in Bitcoin. To steer away from potential attacks via hash rental platforms, ETC Labs intends to seek accountability as well as transparency to hash rental by engaging law enforcement.

ETC Labs wrote a Medium post about the same and pointed out that several crypto platforms are subject to scrutiny from lawmakers all over the world. Anti-money laundering [AML] and KYC have been made mandatory for every crypto platform. Citing NiceHash as a precedent, ETC Labs noted that hash rental platforms often resort to illegal activities. The post further read,

“With little or no KYC, AML, or crypto address screening, customers have the ability to rent hash rate to potentially launder cryptocurrency for freshly minted tokens with no history. Considering how important hash rate is to the security of Proof-of-Work blockchains, this is a serious vulnerability for the blockchain ecosystem as a whole.”

Additionally, ETC Labs affirmed that it had already commenced working with regulators and officials in “relevant jurisdictions”.

While many lauded ETC Labs for its latest move, a few others outrightly condemned the initiative. Bitrefill’s John Carvalho tweeted in response to the ETC Labs’ latest initiative. The tweet read,

Back in mid-August, following the second 51% attack on the network, ETC Labs had proposed an “ETC Network Security Plan“. This elaborate plan consisted of both immediate as well as long term measures to tackle potential attacks. Change in the mining algorithm was one of the primary focuses of the plan. The platform intends to transition the network’s mining algorithm from Ethash aka Dagger Hashimoto Proof-of-Work to either Ethereum’s Keccak256 or RandomX.

Ethereum Classic Suffers Yet Another 51% Attack; 7,000 Blocks Reorganized

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Ethereum Classic [ETC] has suffered a 51% attack for the third time in a month following which reorganization of over 7000 blocks occurred on the network which corresponded to approximately two days of mining.

A chain reorganization takes place when a party gains more hashing power than the rest of the miners in the network. The offending miner then achieves the ability to rewrite the chain’s history and also “double-spend” the blockchain’s native token. The double spends made in the latest attack is not known yet.

A leading organization behind the Ethereum Classic network, ETC Labs called the entire fiasco “suspicious” as it occurred a day after the core-dev meeting.

The 51% attack was first spotted by the mining pool Ethermine’s parent entity Bitfly which revealed that all the lost blocks will be removed from the immature balance and that the platform will check all payouts for dropped transactions.

Ethereum Classic official Twitter handle also responded and tweeted,

“While ETC is still making progress in evaluating proposed solutions, we are aware of the current risk to the network at these low hash rate levels. To miners, exchanges, and other service providers we suggest keeping confirmation requirements levels well above 7K for now.”

Following the attack, Ethereum Classic’s hash rate which was declined significantly over the past couple of months was down by 4.77% in the last 24 hours. At 3.78 Th/s, the hash rate was still hovering close to its three-year low.

ETC Cooperative, which happens to be another prominent foundation supporting ETC network’s development also addressed the recent turn of events and tweeted,

“We are aware of today’s attack and are working with others to test and evaluate proposed solutions as quickly as possible. As ETC makes progress in areas, it still makes up just ~3% of ETH’s hash rate. We kindly ask that miners, exchanges, and others raise confirmations to >12K.”

The network suffered its first 51% attack of the year between July 29 and August 1, when 3,693 blocks were reorganized. Less than a week later 4,000 blocks were reorganized after the network was hit by the second attack. During this time, the adversary was able to double-spend 807,260 ETC [nearly $5.6 million, at that time] after spending 17.5 BTC [around $200,000] to acquire the hash power for the attack.

In light of these events, cryptocurrency exchange, OKEx had revealed that it was considering the removal of the asset.

The series of attacks pertaining to the network insecurity has pushed ETC’s price further down the bearish region as it was down by nearly 50% since February this year. Notably, ETC had suffered a similar attack in 2019.

Coins that Pump in the Bitcoin Crash Week – Which and Why?

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As Bitcoin [BTC] crashed this week, collapsing from 10,000 to 8,569 USD over the last seven days, it dragged the altcoin market in the red zone. While most cryptocurrencies are drenched in the blood-red market, a few altcoins have shown some surges in green. 

History has always shown that altcoins have a correlation with Bitcoin when it dumps or pumps the market steadily follows the lead. But in recent times, the market has been changing, with numerous speculations exploding the internet there are many reasons why Bitcoin lost $3000 over the week. From Coronavirus to the ETF application rejection, rumor has it all. Nevertheless, a change in correlation also hints on the maturity of the market. 

Which and Why

As the time of press, Bitcoin SV [BSV], Ethereum Classic [ETC], and Kyber Network [KNC] show a 6%, 5%, and,  30% surge, respectively.

Bitcoin SV 

As seen in BSV’s 24-hours chart, the coin was being traded at $210 before it experienced a sudden surge of $8 and went up to its current price of $227. According to records, 23,148 BSV  worth 5,048,170 USD was transferred from an unknown wallet to an unknown wallet.

bsv compressor

Speculations suggest that BSV can expect a form of a triple three correction. Anticipating a rise to around $240 before the drop continues.

Ethereum Classic 

ETC registered a 14.17% surge this week. With an on-going surge of 5%, the forked has performed better than the current main-chain Ethereum. It was even observed that ETC outperformed ETH with a 160% Year-To-Date return in 2020. 

etheruem compressor

Today [1st March ‘20], Ethereum Classic showed a consistent rise with a $4 million entering into its market cap.  Although, speculations have suggested that this is the time to “wait” until the sideways range settles. 

Kyber Network 

Kyber Network ranked as the highest surging asset of the day in the top 50 cryptocurrencies. With rank #45 the token is up by 32.12% in the past 24hours. According to Binance researchers, Kyber’s progress means this is the most used DeFi project in space, with more than 35,000 users.

kyber network

Speculations suggest that the hike could be for multiple reasons including its recent listing on Coinbase.

In addition to these assets, Bitfinex’s token UNUS LEO, NEO, Bitcoin Gold [BTG], and Augur [REP] were also hiking the green trail. 

 

Ethereum Classic [ETC] Cannot be Mined with Antminer E3 anymore!

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On 24th February, 2Miner the popular Altcoin mining pool announced that Ethereum Classic mining had a sudden drop of hashrate with Antminer E3 [ETC mining hardware] for which complaints from multiple people were registered.

Antminer E3 was released in the summer of 2018 and the product is by Bitmain, the mining giant. It’s the world’s first Ethash ASIC miner and the profitability of an Antminer E3 is higher than the profitability of an ordinary GPU mining rig. Some details of the product are as follows:

Announced hashrate: 180 MH/s
Actual hashrate: 200 MH/s
Power consumption: 800 W
Retail price: $1,800 ($800 for the very first batch)

From 21st February, 2Miner has been receiving complaints. Miners reported that hashrate had dropped significantly. The miners said that the Antminer E3 was mining Ethereum Classic [ETC] at 30 MHZ from the past 3 hours while the factory declared hashrate of Antminer E3 is 180 MH/s and the reported hashrate is even more.

In the official statement, they mentioned receiving “a lot of requests last week on Telegram Support Chat and 2Miners Helpdesk” about the inconvenience, everyone was experiencing to mine ETC. “We have investigated this issue and the conclusions are disappointing.” said the team.

The problem.

To mine an Ethash algorithm every GPU needs to download a heavy file called DAG [Directed Acyclic Graph] at the beginning of the mining process. The DAG [Every 30 000 blocks, a new piece of data (a DAG) is used for mining new blocks] grows more in every round of Epoch.[ Each new group of 30 000 blocks is known as an epoch]. Which is the major reason why memory matters a lot in Ethereum mining? Ethereum Classic has 328 mining epoch while Ethereum has 318. With investigation, 2Miner found out that the DAG file increment was the reason Antminer E3s had such a drop in its hashrate for ETC.

2Miner reported this issue and informed Bitmain, to which it responded saying:

“Thanks for your consultation!

Sorry for your inconvenience we got the confirm from technical department
E3 miner is a 4G video card. E3 is related to eth algorithm, and DDR capacity is up to the upper limit, so E3 will not be able to continue mining.

the meaning is E3 only can mine to January 2020, then will not mine again

Please let us know if you have additional questions or concerns.”

As per Etherscan.io the avg. ETC block time is about 13 seconds. Each epoch is 30,000 blocks. Making it approx. 45 days for ETC to reach 328 epoch. Indicating that Antminer E3 would stop mining Ethereum Classic by 8th April 2020.