2018-9-19 23:59 |
Tether (USDT) is the eighth largest crypto in the world by market cap and the second most traded one, only losing to Bitcoin. Now, after an incident with the engine that fees data from the Omni protocol to the hosted nodes of the platform, the service has come back to normal.
The Omni protocol is the protocol used to secure Tether, the USD-pegged stablecoin. It is also used in Bitcoin.
The Omni Protocol IncidentThe incident, which happened this Monday, lasted about eight hours. All users who did not operate full nodes had their transactions completely frozen by this time. Many users went to social media to complain that their transactions had stalled. The issue was not directly on the platform but on the parsing engine that is used to feed data to Omni Explorer and Omniwallet.
This made users have their accounts “frozen” while the issue was not yet solved. However, full node operators were unaffected by the issue as the problem was not with them but with the feed that connects with them.
There was plenty of speculation on whether something more serious had occurred or not like a hack or something, but it looks like it was only a minor issue.
Tether, characteristically, did not address the situation publicly just like it generally does. Their Twitter profile did retweet Omni’s initial post stating that the issue would be addressed soon, though. As most of the Tether platforms were using Omni’s free hosted API instead of full nodes, most of the transactions were stopped at the time.
The full downtime was about three times longer than the developers initially estimated, as they thought that they could solve it in two or three hours.
Doubts About TetherUnfortunately for Tether, this event did nothing to make the image of the company better. The crypto markets are facing a severe bear market which has affected the whole market and some observers have doubts on whether Tether’s solvency and price has a relationship with the price of Bitcoin.
Some people, though, are suggesting that this is all a coincidence and that the issue stemmed from the decrease in liquidity that was the result from the Omni API downtime. As soon as the platform was online again, all the services were restored to their full performance.
At the moment, Tether is the eighth largest crypto with a market cap of $2.7 billion USD. No new tokens have been issued by the company since September 2, then it sent 100 million USDT from its treasury to Bitfinex.
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