Zcash protocol could be under spam attack, analysts say noted on Twitter in a long discussion that began on Wednesday.

Being a privacy-focused protocol, the attacker is now misusing Zcash’s “Protected Transaction” feature designed for privacy.

According to details shared by analysts, the attacker has been adding output data to protected transactions, which are largely known to be data sensitive. Under the attack, the size of the blockchain has grown from 31 GB in mid-June to over 100 GB at this time according to data from Blockchair.

The attack has been ongoing for a while, even though the public has just been notified. In fact, the knowledge exhibited by the contributors to the speech on Twitter is evident that many have been investigating the fact for quite some time.

Notably, Zcash has not had any known downtime to date. Spam from protected transactions places heavy demands on the protocol, causing a delay. The blocks have difficulty synchronizing with the larger protocol, a situation that, if it persists, could cause a major inconvenience for the protocol.

“At this point, there only seem to be two problems with spam: It’s inflating the size of the chain and making it difficult for wallets to sync,” said Sean Bowe, an engineer at Zcash core development firm Electric Coin Company, adding that “None of the problems are contributed by Orchard at all. It shouldn’t even be part of the equation even if the spammer was using Orchard!”

It’s unclear what the benefit to the hacker is at this point, but analysts on Twitter noted that the attack has survived this long due to the lack of a transparent fee structure in the Zcash protocol. The attack is remarkably costing the perpetrator(s) as little as $10 per day.

The prevalence of hacking in the blockchain ecosystem is now very alarming as Solana and Ethereum Classic have seen their fair share of outages in recent times.

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