This week’s protagonist is Ethereum (ETH). Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin introduced a new feature that could bring Stealth Addresses to the network. Also, researchers discovered a consensus-level attack where miners could cheat the system to earn more.
Stealth Address with zk-SNARKs
Ethereum developer Anton Wahrstätter (Nerolation) proposes to use zk-SNARK technology to increase the privacy of NFT exchanges. zk-SNARK is a privacy system for cryptocurrency networks.
In Ethereum, there is currently only one privat nyckel for each address. Therefore, receiving an NFT at a new address requires creating a new private key. With the zk-SNARK technology, a hidden address could be generated, derived from a hash of the user’s original public address.
Vitalik Buterin agrees to grant privacy to NFT exchanges with this Ethereum feature. But, he’s not on board with using the zk-SNARK technology because he thinks the current technology of ERC721 tokens is enough.
At the same time, he is concerned that using stealth addresses will significantly increase network fees.
Consensus-level attack on Ethereum
On the other hand, a research paper published by the Hebrew University of Israel recently reported finding “the first consensus-level attack on a major cryptocurrency”.
To discover this vulnerability, the research team used public data from the Ethereum blockchain and the open source base of the cryptocurrency. However, the research still requires peer review.
In a tweet thread, Aviv Yaish, one of the authors, recounted how F2Pool miners changed block timestamps to increase their rewards. Basically, the consensus level attack allows gruvarbetare to change the timestamp of a mined block to avoid further network distress.
Yaish also remarked in an interview that:
For each successful instance of the attack, F2Pool earned 14% more from block rewards, and in addition earned all the transaction fees contained within.
Aviv Yaish, The Hebrew University.
The researchers informed the Ethereum foundation and offered a patch to fix the issue before publishing the research results.
Ethereum mining July performance
Enligt data from Glassnode, July was more profitable for Ethereum miners than for Bitcoin miners. July would be the second month in which Ethereum miners make higher profits.
Ethereum miners generated $652 million in monthly revenue. For their part, Bitcoin miners received profits of $597 million. However, the firm does not attribute these Ethereum revenues to the consensus-level attack.
This week the focus is on Ethereum because it was recently its anniversary. In addition, we are waiting for The Merge, an update that will allow the migration of Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS).
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