Last Wednesday May 9th at 12:00pm, we started our know-your-client (KYC) process, as the first part of doing an initial coin offering (ICO).
We were aware that we have built up a strong community of active members that are very keen on seeing us design and create our technology. We were very excited to take the first step towards our token sale and reminded our KYC provider, Jumio, to make sufficient preparations for it. However, both ourselves and Jumio mis-estimated the amount of interest in our project.
Within a few minutes of opening up the KYC process, the number of requests was so high that it crashed Jumio’s backend infrastructure. We were all very surprised given that we had taken routine cautions to insure that we were not vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. This wasn’t however, a malicious user or a bot attack, it was just an unexpectedly large number of people eager and willing to participate. It was great, but a bit of a surprise.
Given what happened we decided to:
- Take the time to investigate and correct all of the initial problems, not just jump back in quickly.
- Redo the KYC on a weekend (when more resources are available), so it is now Saturday May 19th, at 11:59 am Eastern Time (ET).
- Insert queuing (Queue It) between our site and the KYC provider.
- Separate out the querying, to prevent users from overloading the infrastructure.
- Re-audit all of the included infrastructure (code, machines, process, etc).
- Re-test with our own stress testing, pointed at our sites and the downstreams.
- Work closely with our KYC provider to insure they are prepared as well.
It is very important to note that with these changes, users will only be informed about their KYC status after the process has been finished. This is unfortunate, but given our experience with our first attempt, we realized that the 10K limit will be filled up very quickly, likely not allowing for people to get a second chance if they filed incorrectly. We urge everyone to prepare and submit the correct documents. The excess load from everyone constantly querying to see their status is problematic. We ask that people take their time and ensure that they fill out the forms correctly; having the queue will ensure that if they get to start the process, they will be able to finish it.
We do apologize to the community for any inconvenience our first attempt may have caused. We also want to reassure everyone that while we mis-estimated the interest in our fundraising, we are quick to learn from our mistakes and that we should have given this process the same level of concentration and engineering that we have been applying to our product development efforts.
To make it up to our community who has always been supporting us, we are devoted to ensure that the upcoming KYC process is done seamlessly and smoothly. We would also like to share that we are on track with our roadmap and MVP will be out in June. Stay tuned to our official announcement channel https://t.me/oneledger_official. We have many more exciting updates to share!