A redditor (/u/blueseeker) recently uncovered evidence that F2Pool is manipulating the Ethereum blockchain to ensure that they'll be the first (and also nearly the only people) 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!
By prioritizing their own transactions over the thousands of 50 Gwei transactions that were also trying to get to the Status sale contract and discriminating against others in favour of their own transactions, F2Pool is essentially destroying the basic tenet of all cryptocurrencies and blockchains: decentralization. There are still tens of thousands of pending transactions.
It's easy to imagine a "premium service" for people that would pay F2Pool in exchange for including their transactions, regardless of EVM variables such as gas price and so on. In fact, that is likely already happening behind the scenes. This blatant blockchain manipulation needs to stop! Miners, please point away from F2Pool immediately.