Crypto emerged in response to the Global Financial Crisis, in response to threats from individual institutions such as governments and corporations, who have control over information and access.

This induced early adopters to use Bitcoin and its blockchain, which belongs to no one and exists nowhere. This creates networks that should be developed, supported and used by many people, without anyone exerting too much control over them.

And the ledgers created on such networks are designed to be immutable. One of the biggest threats to the ideal of decentralization is therefore a so-called "51% attack".

In this attack, a party controlling computers that process transactions on the blockchain takes over more than half of the total power balance in the network.

This so-called Mining Pool therefore gets the opportunity to manipulate the Blockchain Ledger, to pretend transactions and even to spend the digital tokens running on the network more than once, a process known as "double spending". Last week, this impending scenario came up in crypto circles when the Digital Asset Exchange Coinbase announced that a mining pool called ViaBTC had gained more than 51% of the power on the Zcash network, with its touted privacies.

To protect the security of user funds, Coinbase implemented a series of new measures, including a "Limit-Only State" for Zcash markets, which is supposed to mitigate the impact of fluctuations. For many, the idea of a "51% attack" being carried out on one of the better-known networks was extremely disturbing. However, as it turns out, there will already be many other blockchains where a miner controls 51%.

This situation is "quite common" among the lesser-known tokens, according to Slava Karpenko of the mining pool 2Miners. Partly it is due to the economic conditions of the miners: the more computing power behind a mining pool - which involves many individual miners, but is centrally organized - the more transaction blocks it can arrange and receive more coin rewards.

The mining pool that receives the most rewards will thus attract more users, leading to a concentration of power. Because of the reduced prices, many coins do not provide enough incentives to attract such miners. Therefore, many smaller blockchains are exposed to the possibility of a 51% attack.