A redditor (/u/blueseeker) recently revealed that F2Pool is manipulating the Ethereum blockchain to ensure that they'll be the first to invest in the new Status.im ICO. This piqued my interest and so I dug deeper. This is what I found:
- First they made a ton of different addresses (30, to be exact) and sent 100 ETH to each of those. Examples include: this one and this one. There are many more to be found if you look at their transactions.
- Then they stopped including transactions in their blocks a half an hour before the ICO was due to launch.
- In their first blocks discovered after the ICO, they included only the transactions from those addresses. The blocks I could find were 3903912 and 3903913.
- After the fact they don't raise the gas limit on their pool, and now they take advantage of their power to game the network.
A few facts about this incident:
- F2Pool controls 25% of the network hashrate, which means that, statistically, 1 out of 4 blocks are theirs.
- In total (from the blocks that we've noticed), F2Pool has successfully manipulated just under 3,100 ETH during the Status.im. That's nearly $1.24 million dollars!
This blatant blockchain manipulation needs to stop!