Chia Network has just posted an official response to the Chia Dust Storm going on, the high volume of single mojo transactions. The update basically says that they aware of the problem, that they are going to shift resources from new features to optimization and that there isn’t anything to be done.
Since mid afternoon on Saturday the 30th (PST) there has been increasing waves of transaction spam, what is also commonly known as a “Dust storm” on other crypto networks. This is when an individual user sends exceptionally large amounts of minimum sized transactions (in this case 1 mojo) to thousands of wallets, in an attempt to strain the network.
All they have really done, however, is take the unused overhead in each block that as of now was simply waiting to be filled with transactions and filled more of it. Generally speaking the chain has handled it well with most nodes keeping things running smoothly. Additionally, if users include fees with their transaction (a previously unneeded requirement due to market demands), then your transactions will leap ahead of the Duster’s and deprioritize them.
J Eckert, VP of Ecosystem Operations Chia Network Inc
The statement goes on to answer some questions about what they are doing about the attack and how people can get their transactions through (a 0.0001 mojo will cut it, anything lower doesn’t count). Go read the full statement on GitHub to get the full set of answers.
Separately from this an anonymous Chia farmer has been tracing the coins created and destroyed during this attack and reached out to me with the following information:
I have been following mojo from the Chia dusting ‘attack’ and identified that the vast majority of the coins were farmed in march/april by farmers associated with the HPool address: xch1f0ryxk6qn096hefcwrdwpuph2hm24w69jnzezhkfswk0z2jar7aq5zzpfj
It appears to have occurred in stages with rewards amounts being split to smaller coins in batches:
ex. 5/7 ~ 5/14 rewards split into 1 xch coins
ex. 5/14 coins split into sub xch amounts (< 3000 mojo)
ex. 10/27 coins split into individual Mojo
I do not believe there is a way to avoid this but wanted to share some preliminary findings. I did notice that whomever did this became much more efficient at splitting coins; however, this efficiency was at the cost of making the dusting much more noticeable (i.e. the first link appears to be standard transactions where by the last link there is an obvious attempt to split coins)
Anonymous Reddit farmer
So it looks like the person responsible for the Dust Storm here has either been farming Chia for a while or has access to coins that were farmed very early on. I do not think that Hpool is behind this, but it is possible that the person who is responsible has farmed Hpool. Or its all a big nothingburger, i have no idea how accurate these tools are for doing forensics.
My guess is that this is the new reality for Chia, and that the days of free transactions are over. Already the curious are figuring out how to reverse this attack and basically anyone can do it. The cat is out of the bag and I think we just have transaction fees now.
Update: Second update to the situation, with a promise to optimize the full node.
