Poloniex properly separates ETC and ETH to offset replay attacks

There are a lot of questions that need to be answered with the addition of Ethereum Classic (ETC) to the Poloniex exchange. After all, this is the original Ethereum, there is no hard fork code, and the 'regular' ETH currency also exists. Poloniex lists some common issues and puts them together to solve them. It's good to see some exchanges take responsibility for their actions, while others are even more inclined to ignore the situation.

Poloniex No Replay Attack Vulnerability

One of the biggest confusions is around the so-called 'replay attack', a problem that should have been solved by Ethereum developers months ago, but was still not completely resolved at the time of the hard fork, and many people were concerned about this issue before the fork. Unlike Ethereum developers, Poloniex did everything they could to separate ETH and ETC to make replay attacks fail. Every address used by Poloniex only exists on one of the two chains, and never on both chains at the same time.

However, on the Ethereum blockchain, ETH and ETC are still linked together. Developers speculated that ETC would lose traction, but in the past few days, the opposite has happened, with ETC transaction volume surpassing ETH. As a result, ETH will need to implement another hard fork to correct this sloppy coding by developers. Never make guesses in the field of cryptocurrency, otherwise they will come back to haunt you.

That said, users making deposits on Poloniex are still vulnerable to replay attacks if they do not take precautions to separate their ETC and ETH funds. The Poloniex system will accordingly split the funds into account balances into their unique and correct addresses.

The best way to solve this problem is for users to do everything they can to separate the two wallets at an early stage, preferably before sending funds to an exchange. Most people use the Ethereum Mist wallet. This wallet can be exploited as a proprietary ETC wallet by refusing to activate the hard fork code during installation. Remember, the verification client is still in development.

For the time being, there are still some interesting things that need to happen soon. First, Ethereum developers need to clean up their code to ensure that replay attacks are ineffective by default. Second, Ethereum Classic will not disappear, even though some people want it to disappear. ETC has already gained some support, and the interest brought by ETC is still increasing.