The developers of Horizen have found a way to protect the network from the "51% attack"

After this year's 51% attack on the Horizen network (the former ZenCash project) was carried out, the developers immediately began to look for a way to protect themselves in order to prevent similar attacks in the future. As a result, according to the Horizen team, it managed to develop a protective system with a “delay function”.

It was she who, according to the developers, prevents the commission of attacks, making their organization very expensive. As the co-founder of the Horizen project, Rob Viglion, noted, the function creates “massive costs, tenfold, to try to launch such an attack,” so it becomes unprofitable for the attacker.

Viglion noted that the frequent attacks that capture most of the hashrate of a cryptocurrency, undermine the reputation of the entire industry and cause distrust on the part of investors. Therefore, it is important to develop a method of protection against such attacks.

How does the protection function work?

To organize a 51% attack, the miner needs to keep the blocks secret for some time, but in such cases the “protection function” automatically penalizes the user for such delays.

"We have an average time for a block to be 2.5 minutes, the maximum waiting time for transmission to anywhere in the world is 1 or 2 seconds, so there is no chance that 5 blocks will be lawfully detained," the company noted.

The co-founder of the project Horizen does not deny the possibility of toughening measures for unreliable miners delaying blocks. For example, it is possible to increase the fine. The system can easily adapt to such changes, Viglion notes.

At the moment, the 51% protection method has been successfully tested, which lasted several months, and is ready to be implemented in practice. “Other projects should also update their code,” the company said.