Privacy Coin Firo, Formerly Known as Zcoin, Suffering a 51% Attack

The privacy coin Firo, which is formerly known as Zcoin, is currently going through a 51% attack. The team is yet to share further details, though they’ve clarified that they are working with exchanges and pools at the time of this writing.

• Privacy coin Firo is currently going through what is known as a “51% attack.” The nature of this entails that a malicious actor has managed to get a hold of at least 51% of the hashrate of a blockchain based on the Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm, which is the case of Firo.
• The team has made it clear that this is “not a coding error but a nature of PoW.
• Moreover, the most recent update reveals that they are currently working with exchanges and pools. Additionally, they said that chain locks that would have “prevented this were being tested on testnet and was weeks away from deployment.”

We are under 51% attack at the moment. We recommend not to make transactions during this time until the network returns to a normal state. We will post updates when we have them. Note this is not a coding error but a nature of PoW. $XZC $FIRO

— Firo (formerly Zcoin) (@firoorg) January 20, 2021

• At the time of this writing, the price of Firo has slid by about 15%.
• 51% attacks are not new to the cryptocurrency field. Just last year, CryptoPotato reported that Ethereum Classic went through yet another such incident.
• According to the popular analytics resource Crypto 51, the cost of attacking Bitcoin’s network through a 51% attack would be approximately about $716,072 per hour, making it by far the most secure network out there.