Ethereum Network Spammed to Increase Transaction Fees; EOS Allegedly Behind the Attack

The Ethereum network recently experienced a large-scale congestion, leading crypto analysts to conclude that an attack has been launched against the second largest cryptocurrency in the world. The congestion led to gas prices – the amount paid by users to conduct a transaction – spiking, essentially increasing the standard fee being charged by the service.

While attacks in recent months in the crypto sphere have been coming from hackers, the spam that the Ethereum network experienced is allegedly by EOS, the fifth largest cryptocurrency in the world. The accusation was made by “Justo,” an Ethereum developer and lead creator of Ethereum games Fomo3D (an exit scam simulator) and P3D, Finder reported.

Justo and his team noticed the network congestion and began investigating, which led them to this particular contract. Basically, it’s a useless token called iFish that does literally nothing. Despite this fact, however, there are a lot of accounts burning money in gas fees to continuously move the token around. It’s estimated that whoever is pumping gas to this particular token is spending 50 ETH per hour, that’s $22,000 gone to have the token do absolutely nothing.

Finding a lead, Justo followed the trail and ended up in a single token minting location where 5 billion of these worthless fish tokens were generated. After their creation, the tokens were then disseminated to other accounts that would, in turn, distribute them to more accounts, spreading the 5 billion useless tokens.

When the fish tokens were passed around thousands of different wallets, accounts that owned the tokens chuck them around at inflated prices with no particular function other than to spam the Ethereum network. But what Justo found was merely the minting source. In order to find who’s really behind the attack, he tried looking where the money is coming from that is funding the gas fees needed to bounce the fish tokens around. After some time, he apparently tracked it down to an EOS crowdfund wallet.

This is damning evidence that EOS is behind the unusual inflation of gas fees in the Ethereum network. EOS attacking Ethereum isn’t surprising since the latter is the former’s largest rival.

EOS has also shown in the past it’s willing to burn money in order to undermine its competitor. And with EOS acquiring a lot of funding recently from prominent investors like Peter Thiel and Jihan Wu, it’s likely that Ethereum will see more of these attacks in the future.