The Ethereum network is experiencing copious transactions all connected to a single account, leading to broad speculation about their purpose.
A strange series of transactions on the Ethereum network began yesterday, leading to speculation that the network was the victim of a spam attack. The transactions are all connected to a single address, which is now involved with the bulk of Ethereum transactions.
Starting around 2:45 UTC Monday, the address in question[1] received its very first transaction, a transfer of 0.02 Ether. In the next fifteen minutes, 600 transactions were made to that same address.
The transactions have continued at that pace, with the address racking up more than 48,000 transactions in the last 30 hours. Most of these transactions involved the transfer of 0.02 Ether and had a transaction fee of around 0.004 Ether. This means that if it is an attack, it has been a fairly expensive one for whoever is orchestrating it. The total transaction fees likely exceed 160 Ether by now (a value of somewhere in the neighborhood of $61,000 at time of press).
Several comments[2] on Etherscan indicate some believe the transactions were a coordinated spam attack on the network. One user wrote:
"It's a botted ring wallet system with nearly 150,000 to 200,000 [Ether] in it. The bots translate random addresses to other random addresses and random amounts of eth to make them difficult to spot on block history."
One commenter even speculated rival blockchain EOS was coordinating an attack. EOS members are planning a stress test[3] on the EOS system tomorrow, hoping to set a record for transactions-per-second – a feat that would be particularly notable against the backdrop of Ethereum suffering another network slowdown[4].
EOS members have been accused of
