The Litecoin network was disrupted yesterday afternoon due to a spam attack. Although that is rather unusual, it forced exchanges to halt LTC trading for some time. It appears this attack has now been resolved and things are back to normal. Interestingly enough, this spam attack did not disrupt the LTC price all that much. All of this goes to show Litecoin is still a very resilient currency, compared to some others.
Network spam attacks are something we have seen in the Bitcoin world multiple times. Someone starts sending a ton of transactions to overload the network. Considering how Litecoin activated SegWit not too long ago, such attacks are very expensive to pull off. Or they would be, assuming the Core client generated SegWit transactions by default. It is a bit unclear what the attacker attempted to achieve by spamming the Litecoin network, though.
Exchanges Suffer From Litecoin Spam Attack
According to Reddit, one address started broadcasting transactions with 140+ inputs over and over again. Interestingly enough, the spammer also paid US$4 in fees for every single transaction. Whether or not this was all worth the money, remains to be seen. The disruption did not have the desired effect by any means, though. After all, LTC is still stable, despite exchanges having to halt trading for a bit.
Seeing exchanges halt LTC trading briefly due to this spam attack is a bit troublesome, though. When the Bitcoin network suffers from spam, there is no talk about halting trades whatsoever. It seems this panic reaction was not the best course of action by any of the exchanges. Then again, they want to protect customers from financial harm, which is understandable. All things considered, it didn’t take all that long before things went back to normal.
Exchanges halting LTC trading include Poloniex and BTC-e. More specifically, Poloniex froze the market due to “maintenance”. BTC-E, on the other hand, blocked withdrawals for a while. GDAX was also affected, as they were dealing with delayed withdrawals. It is evident this spam attack is of grave concern, but things are back to normal as we speak. Litecoin is still trading at US$45, indicating such attacks are not affecting the price all that much.
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