Altcoin News: Distribution of ETH Human-Readable Addresses Suspended Due to Auction Bugs

October 1, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

The developers of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) registry, which allows people to register human-readable ETH addresses, on Monday announced a temporary suspension of the first auction for address allocation in the OpenSea secondary market due to bugs. This auction is of particular interest to bidders, as short addresses containing 3 to 6 characters are distributed through it.

In some cases, users could not pass the price offer due to problems with the input-form, as a result of which their bids were not considered by the system. OpenSea promises to contact affected users to provide them with instructions for placing the correct applications.

The second bug turned out to be more problematic. One of the users found a way to get particularly valuable addresses by sending applications for registration of other addresses. In particular, he was able to take possession of such names as defi.eth, wallet.eth and apple.eth.

“Fortunately, we caught this and halted finalization before they could get more than a few (16) names. We’ve identified and patched the issue that made this possible,” the publication says.

The ENS service was launched in 2017 and is an automated registry that allows anyone to register a domain name ending in .eth through an auction. The identifiers foundation.eth and exchange.eth were bought back soon after the launch of ENS for $27,000 and $609,000, respectively. For what amount the user managed to acquire addresses using a bug, it was not specified.

Author: Marko Vidrih