Last month the Bittrex Exchange and its affiliated sites took Expanse offline for maintenance. Much to our dismay, we learned that Expanse was hit with a 51% reorg attack through no fault of its own.
A 51% attack is when an attacker controls 51% of the total hashrate and uses that power to rewrite recent transaction history. Note that here was no loss to Expanse-holders, and the chain was secured and back up within a few days.
As annoying as the downtime was, many good things evolved from dealing with the issue:
- Many new people joined the Expanse Discord community, now with 2255 members.
- Numerous ongoing lively and interesting conversations were sparked in regard to the future and potential of Expanse. The channel was literally buzzing 24 hours per day.
- Members who had been away for awhile returned to voice support and encouragement.
- Updates were put into place making it impossible for Expanse to suffer another 51% attack.
- We implemented PirlGuard, further securing the platform from threats.
- A few days after the maintenance, someone tried to hit Expanse with an 80% attack and left empty-handed, reinforcing the security of our platform. The code is that strong.
- Our lead developer, Christopher Franko, conceived of a completely new, never-before-used mining algorithm that is completely unique to Expanse. It is called Frankomoto, and we plan to release it in the May timeframe.
Focusing on the positives of the situation, Expanse is taking steps forward. One of our community members cited Expanse as easily becoming the most “secure platform n the space.”
“Frankomoto will make Expanse more secure and more unique, taking us a nice step away from ETH in a positive way,” said Franko. “It will increase the finality of Expanse transactions, while keeping GPU mining relevant.”