Namebase Blog

October Platform Update

Regarding Recent Namebase Issues

Recent Issues

In early September, Namebase started experienced syncing issues with 2 of our 8 hot wallets which ultimately kept them offline for most of the month. During this time some bids were not correctly revealed and many bids were not sent. We would like to sincerely apologize to all who were impacted by these issues. We know it has been extremely frustrating and many have lost time, money, and opportunity. We are now working to identify and automatically refund all $HNS that is stuck or lost. We expect that the majority of $HNS will be refunded in the next two weeks. We will do everything necessary to make things right. While our system is still processing a large backlog of name withdrawals, everything else should now be fully functional.

Technical Details

The two wallets affected by the syncing issue were responsible for the majority of the new name auctions over the last year. While the wallets were down, no bids or reveals could be sent. Once the wallets were back online, they became overwhelmed with the backlog of transactions, particularly with errors due to auctions which were not active. Due to the synchronous nature of our wallet balancing system, this backlog of transactions contributed to a cascading effect where other, newer transactions were not being processed in a timely manner, causing further delays. A compounding factor has been the age and large scale of these wallets, which makes the process of creating transactions slower and more CPU intensive than normal. We have alleviated much of the burden of these two wallets by adding two new hot wallets to take responsibility for auctions and bids. We have renewed all domains that are approaching expiration. We have added additional visibility into the health and status of the wallets to help avoid future issues. Ultimately our wallet backend needs some changes for scale and redundancy, and we'll be making those improvements in tandem with new features going forward.

New All-Star Team

While the timing of the wallet issues has been unfortunate, big changes to Namebase were already underway. The team has grown from 3 to 10 in just the last two months. We are thrilled to welcome the following heavy hitters, all veteran contributors to the Handshake community:

We have big plans for major improvements to Namebase, and we're excited and working very hard to bring them to you. We'll have more info on those changes soon. Our top priority is the long term success and adoption of Handshake.