Minimum Gas Price: Preventing Spam Transactions & Dusting Attacks
As we celebrate the growth of cryptocurrencies like Umee, we also recognize the potential threats that its users may face. Two of the most common threats are spam transactions and dusting attacks. When enacted by bad actors, these actions may clog up the network, making it difficult for users to conduct legitimate transactions.
Fortunately, Umee has a solution to help prevent these attacks: setting a minimum gas price.
In this post, we'll tell you more about what spam transactions and dusting attacks are, and explain how Umee's minimum gas price can help prevent them.
What are Spam Transactions and Dusting Attacks?
Spam transactions are transactions that are created solely to congest the network. They typically have very low transaction fees, which means that they cannot be processed quickly. A number of these transactions can slow down the entire network, making it more difficult for legitimate transactions to be processed.
Dusting attacks are often carried out to either track the movement of cryptocurrency or to compromise user privacy. They involve an attacker sending a small amount of cryptocurrency to a large number of addresses.
These are both dangerous threats that frustrate the actions of legitimate users or endanger them by jeopardizing their privacy.
How Do Umee’s Minimum Gas Prices Help Prevent These Attacks?
Umee counters the threat posed by spam transactions and dusting attacks by implementing a minimum gas price. By definition, it is the lowest price at which a transaction can be processed on the network.
Setting a minimum gas price ensures that all transactions have a minimum fee attached to them. This filters out spam transactions, which will not be processed due to having much lower fees than the minimum amount required.
This minimum fee requirement also makes it much harder for bad actors to execute dusting attacks. They typically need to send small amounts of cryptocurrency to a large number of addresses. With a minimum gas price in place, the cost of executing a dusting attack becomes prohibitively expensive, as each transaction must include a minimum fee. It's a more expensive figure than most attackers are willing to shoulder, so they likely won't.
How Do You Set a Minimum Gas Price on Umee?
As an Umee user, you thankfully don’t have to be responsible for setting a minimum gas price by yourself. Our devs have already done it for you! We have altered the code to set a minimum gas price for each transaction at 0.1 $UMEE.
Implementing this setting directly into the code ensures that all transactions on the Umee network will be subject to this minimum fee condition.
You can rest easy knowing that no transaction will ever be processed without meeting this requirement.
Conclusion
Spam transactions and dusting attacks can become serious problems for cryptocurrency networks like Umee. By setting a minimum gas price, Umee can help prevent these attacks, ensuring that the network remains fast and efficient for all users. Take advantage of this feature as an Umee user, and protect yourself and your assets from potential threats.
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