Last week Ethereum Classic experienced a 51% attack. 51% attack means when a hacker manages to collect over 51% of the computing (hashing) power on the network. With 51% of the hashpower a hacker can’t steal or spend other people’s coins. Instead an attacker spends their own coins (ie sell them on an exchange) then announces an alternative version of the blockchain that they have been secretly mining where their coins are not spent. Since they have 51% of the computing power, that blockchain will be the valid blockchain accepted by the rest of the network and the attacker can respend their coins again which they had already spent before. During the hack a total of 219,500 ETC (around $1.1 million) has been double spent. In reaction to the event exchanges have increased the block confirmations for Ethereum Classic transactions to 400 (roughly 1 hour and 40 minutes) or more. The price of ETC dropped by 21% over the last week. However a crypto exchange Gate.io has reported that the hacker has returned the $100,000 worth of ETC back to Gate.io with no explanation.

The Ethereum Constantinople hard fork will activate on 16th of January. A hard fork is an update to the network that is not compatible backward. Contentious hard forks create two seperate blockchains if people are still using the old version. This is how ETC was created from Ethereum and BCH from BTC when there’s a disagreement within the community. The Constantinople hard fork is not contentious. Everyone in the network will update and start using the new Ethereum blockchain. If you are an Ether holder you have nothing to do. Exchanges and wallets will handle all the technical requirements without you even noticing. However be aware of scam coins such as Ethereum Nowa and Ethereum Classic Vision, that are taking advantages of this hard fork and ask users to enter their private keys.

tZero a security token trading platform, which is a subsidiary of Overstock, began distributing tokens. Overstock is the first major online retailer to accept Bitcoin as a payment method in 2014 and they recently announced that they would use Bitcoin to pay a portion of its taxes in Ohio. tZero is developing a regulated exchange for security tokens that will bring traditional Wall Street stocks to blockchain. tZero raised $134 million from over 10,000 global investors during its security token offering (STO). In October, 2018 tZero completed its issuance of the tZERO security tokens. In order to ensure compliance with federal securities law and regulations the tokens themselves that were locked up in the custodial wallet until 10th of January 2019. Holders of the tZero will receive 10% dividend on a quarterly basis.