No CommentsThe Coin-Swap exchange recently went offline due to technical issues related to the roll-out of the latest version of the underlying software.
The developers of Coin-Swap had initially planned a brief outage of service while they switched to GO which they believed would make the site more reliable. Late last night, the site came back online from the updates and functioned for about twenty minutes before being taken offline by administrators once again.
Users of the updated site noticed issues with balances not decreasing appropriately after trades had been made and came into the site’s IRC chatroom to report the issue. Administrators of the exchange immediately brought the site offline and began working to restore the earlier version after an extensive line-by-line audit of all balances.
The site now has the following notice:
We are reverting to our old trade engine and auditing our books. We greatly apologize for the inconvenience.
Update 12/20 9:22 AM ET: Good morning. I will not have much of an update right now except that our new engine did not work as intended. We have been informed that people were able to withdrawal more than they should have been able to. Thank you to those that informed us. The next step is going to be a very long and detailed look at our logs. There is no other solution than to go through all of the transactions one by one and there are a few thousand. This will not be fast and we will not open up until we have a good handle on our situation. I GREATLY apologize for the mess. My name is Ian Childress and my Linkedin profile is . I am not a scammer, I made code that broke. I will give more details as I have them.
Update 12/20 9:37 AM ET: Quickly checking in. I want to confirm that no one gained illegal entry into our system at any time. It was not a hack, it was faulty code that didnt adjust balances properly. It was about a 20 minute window from what I can tell. We still have the vast majority of our reserves but until I can say yes this is your correct balance, you may withdrawal it I cannot open back up. Due to the balance bug, SOME people have a higher balance than they should have. This makes our database balance and wallet balance not match up. Until we can determine exactly where everything went, we cannot open. I expect this to take at least 24 hours. I greatly apologize and take full responsibility. I will not disappear, I will continue to work until everything is resolved in the best way possible.
It appears that the team of developers behind the site are working to restore the previous version of the trading engine and verify current account balances.
We spoke briefly with Ian at 11:30am EST about the situation. He reassured us he was working to correct the issue and gave us a bit more insight on the issues stating,
I believe I have isolated what went wrong, and it had to do with a unique index that was not in the production table. I changed a query during migration (they never go perfect) and that query inserted balances instead of updating them due to “INSERT…ON UNIQUE UPDATE” and there wasn’t a unique index.
We have logs of the whole incident and we are working to correct all incorrect balances. It’s going to take a long time. We did have peopel withdrawal funds that they didnt have due to the database picking the first row balance (and not the inserts) but we still have the vast majority of coins. The discrepency between the two we won’t know until we go through all the balances and subtract the orders that were created.
We’ll stick this out and do everything we can to get back up soon and allow people to get access to their funds.
Ian and his team are working to resolve the issues and bring the exchange back online as quickly as possible.
