Dear Streamflow Community,
In our continuous journey to innovate and empower, we’ve embraced permissionless airdrops as one of the central features of our platform. This functionality aligns with our vision to democratize token distribution, fostering a decentralized and inclusive financial ecosystem. However, with innovation comes the responsibility to manage new challenges effectively. Recently, we experienced an incident that highlighted both the strengths and the areas for improvement in our approach.
What Happened
During the recent token distribution for NyanHeroes and SchoolHackCoin, we encountered a significant surge in traffic due to the high volume of simultaneous airdrop claims. This unprecedented load on our servers led to degraded API and site performance, affecting users’ ability to connect their wallets and claim their tokens for approximately 14 hours.
Impact of Permissionless Airdrops
Traffic Surge
The permissionless nature of our airdrops allowed a large number of users to participate without prior coordination. While this inclusivity is a core strength, it also meant that we faced an unexpected and greater than anticipated volume of traffic that strained our infrastructure beyond its capacity.
Check it out:
Even though our backend was mostly down on the app side, we managed to serve some requests:
Scalability Challenges
Our system was initially designed to handle high loads, but the rapid increase in the number of users (from an anticipated 300k to 800k for NyanHeroes) exceeded the scalability limits of our platform. This highlighted the need for more robust scaling solutions to accommodate such spikes in usage.
Real-Time Response Complexity
The permissionless feature means we need to be prepared for real-time increases in demand that may not be planned. During the incident, our team worked tirelessly to address the issues, from increasing server capacity to optimizing backend processes. While we managed to restore services, it was a clear indication that we need to enhance our infrastructure to handle real-time scaling more effectively.
Lessons Learned and Next Steps
Infrastructure Upgrades
We are investing in significant infrastructure upgrades, including server capacity enhancements and advanced load-balancing techniques, to better manage high traffic volumes.
Improved Monitoring and Alerts
We are implementing more sophisticated monitoring tools and alert systems to detect and respond to traffic surges more quickly, efficiently and automatically.
Enhanced Communication Protocols
We recognize the importance of keeping our community informed during incidents. We are developing comprehensive communication strategies to ensure significantly more timely updates and transparency.
Scalability Testing
We will conduct extensive scalability testing to simulate high-traffic scenarios, ensuring that our system can handle large-scale airdrops without performance degradation.
Moving Forward with Optimism
While the recent incident was challenging, it has provided us with invaluable insights into the operational demands of permissionless airdrops. We remain committed to our vision of a decentralized and user-empowered financial ecosystem. The steps we are taking will not only prevent similar issues in the future but also make Streamflow stronger and more resilient.
We want to extend a sincere apology to NyanHeroes and SchoolHackCoin for the disruption and the impact this incident had on their projects. We deeply regret the negative experience they had, and we are taking concrete steps to ensure such issues do not occur again. Your partnership and trust are incredibly important to us, and we are committed to rebuilding your confidence in our platform.
We appreciate the patience and support of our community as we work through these growing pains. Our commitment to innovation and excellence remains unwavering, and we are excited about the future improvements that will make our platform better for everyone.
Thank you for your continued trust and for being a part of the Streamflow journey.
The Streamflow Team
