An Airdrop Caused EOS Network Outages

November 6, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

The EOS network has difficulty processing transactions and allocating computing resources over the past week.

According to Titan Labs, in mid-October, EOS contracts totaled 150,000 daily users, but by early November, the value had fallen by 43%, reaching a minimum level for the whole year.

Image credit: Titan Labs

The reason (probably) was the airdrop of the EIDOS project launched on Friday, which allows users to “mine” tokens using unused CPU resources. A user sending 0.0001 EOS to an EIDOS contract address receives a refund of their funds plus 0.811 EIDOS. Since EIDOS comes at a price ($0.029 at the time of publication), EOS holders are motivated to participate in the campaign.

“EIDOS is basically free money,” said Jon Jordan, DappRadar’s communications director, in a conversation with the Decrypt portal.

As EOS holders began to seek out new ways to automate the process of obtaining tokens, the network began to work more slowly.

“What’s happening is people can earn more money through this airdrop, they’re using up all the blockchain’s resources,” added Jordan.

According to the observations of Chain Clash developer Adrian Crayon, the cost of using the EOS network has risen from 10,000 to 20,000 times compared with the level that was observed last Thursday.

“This effectively prevents quite a bunch of people from even using the EOS network, at all,” he said.

EOS Knights developers have reported that launching Dapps has become problematic “because of an issue on the EOS network.”

Dexaran analyst claims the problem lies a little deeper. In the EOS network, each block is created with an interval of 500 milliseconds: the block must be validated within 200 milliseconds, and another 300 milliseconds are provided for its transmission to the network. As soon as a sufficient number of computers rests on the threshold of 200 milliseconds, the network goes into overload mode and cuts off the available CPU capacity.

“The congestion of the network takes too long to recover and resume its normal state. To increase the cost of a similar attack, the state of the network and the congestion should resolve faster,” explained Dexaran.

Author: Marko Vidrih