On Saturday (November 9), Coinbase said that it has been “degraded performance” for EOS transactions since 1 November 2019, and that this poor performance has been caused by the increased traffic on the EOS network due to the recent EIDOS token airdrop.

Here is what is going with EOS based on information in Coinbase’s report and information released via the Twitter account of Enumivo. 

  • On 1 November 1, Coinbase started noticing that there was so much congestion on the EOS network that the only way it was able to “unblock customer transactions” was by “increasing the amount of staked CPU” in the EOS wallets it controls. As EOSWriter explained on November 7, this congestion meant that regular users of the network had no chance to make transactions:

If you’re a regular user and don’t have a lot of CPU resources, you probably won’t be able to make a transaction. You will get a failure message about 'billable CPU exceeding, etc'. The end result is that your transaction won’t go through.

  • Here is how the Enumivo Twitter account announced the EIDOS airdrop on October 30:
  • Although testing of the EISOS airdrop took place on October 31, it was not until November 1 that the EIDOS faucet was deployed on the address “eidosonecoin::
  • The first EIDOS tokens were given away at 08:00 UTC on November 1:
  • Various crypto exchanges, such as Bithumb Global, started listing EIDOS/USDT trading pairs on November 1, which meant that people could sell the EIDOS tokens they had received via the airdrop.
  • On November 1, the increased activity on the EOS network caused it to go into congestion mode (Coinbase says that this “limits the amount of transactions a user can broadcast to their pro-rata share of total staked CPU resources on the EOS network”). Here is Coinbase explaining the reason for the EOS network entering congestion mode in more detail:

Currently, we’re observing around 95% of all EOS transfer actions are related to the EIDOS contract. Because each transfer counts towards the amount of CPU used in a block, this spike in transfer actions caused the EOS network to enter congestion mode.

  • Coinbase points out that the EOS protocol is not behaving strangely; it is just that the EOS network will stay congested until “it is no longer profitable to collect EIDOS or until the massive leases taken out on REX expire after 30 days and the leasers don’t renew their lease.”
  • Coinbase says that this was the state of the EOS network as of November 8:

As of November 8th 2019, the EOS network is still in a congested state. Only addresses with significant CPU resources staked are able to have their transactions processed in a reasonable amount of time.

  • By November 8, day eight of the EIDOS airdrop, around 25000 EOS accounts had received free EIDOS tokens:
  • This is a list of exchanges where EIDOS is being traded:
  • Although much anger has been expressed in the EOS Telegram groups, the people behind the EIDOS airdrop remain unapologetic:

 

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