Post
Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [ANN] Signatum - New Algorithm - Fair Launch - No Premine
by
coreshift
on 19/09/2017, 06:17:08 UTC
Delist Notice: Signatum
As the vast majority of Signatum customers will be aware, there have been recent issues with this coin, which has led to us putting it in the delisting queue. Signatum is currently scheduled to be delisted on 20 Oct 2017. Read on for the reasons why this has been deemed our best course of action at this time.

The combination of us having 18,000 addresses and users mining directly to our addresses caused there to be over a million small inputs. This caused the wallet to irreparably break while syncing. We attempted to resolve this many times, using different distros and hardware configurations, however this did not work. If we synced the blockchain first, then imported the keys, it would start importing 5-10 keys / second, however this rate drops to about 1 key every 3-4 seconds after ~15k. After a week of importing keys on several instances the wallets corrupted and crashed every time. We also tried importing the keys first then syncing the blockchain, in this case it synced back to around 19th August and then also crashed and corrupted.

We have determined this to be likely due to the leveldb library used within the coin which is extremely out of date. It is the same library used in many other coins, however most use a much more up to date version.
This is why the Signatum wallet had been in maintenance for around the last month, while we have been constantly attempting to work with it. During this time, we had a Signatum team member visit our office in person and found no issues with our implementation of Signatum, and observe the sync issues. We have also been in constant communication with a Signatum team member informing of what was happening throughout and were told by him that he was informing the rest of their team.

To finally resolve this, we have managed to set up 8 separate wallets and imported 1/8 of the overall keys into each of these. We then had to move transactions around to consolidate the tiny inputs. This is a terribly painful process and not scalable.

FYI we are currently having to move coins from the 8 wallets to 1 consolidated wallet to process withdrawals. Once this process is complete, we will then scan the 8 wallets for any missing deposits, so anyone that has made deposits while it has been in maintenance will have to wait until this before their deposits show up so they can withdraw again.(edited)
The reason we are now closing the markets is that the Signatum community and now the core Signatum team have blamed us for this issue and are threatening us with litigation, when the issue is purely with the Signatum wallet and out of date codebase. The dev does not seem able or willing to fix the issues with their code. We have put in a very significant amount of time trying to get this up and running so our users can use their coins. However, it is not our responsibility to work with the Signatum codebase (or any other coin) to fix their problems any further, we've already gone well beyond what we should be doing to resolve this.

Some users have been comparing us to other exchanges and asking why they don't have a similar problem. We have a significantly higher number of transactions than the other exchanges that currently list this coin. They will run into similar issues when they reach a more significant level of transactions. The problem with Signatum codebase is provable and replicable. They need to fix this or this will happen again wherever Signatum ends up.

Signatum now appears to also be threatening Cryptopia with legal action (via twitter) and accusing Cryptopia of not knowing how to use wallets. We run and maintain literally many hundreds of wallets. Signatum built just 1 wallet by copying very old code from elsewhere and don't seem able or willing to update it to something that actually works at scale. Draw your own conclusions, and if you back Signatum after all this good luck to you.

Published by: Hex @ 9/19/2017 2:49:29 AM

https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/News

Regardless of where the fault lies, a major exchange has now put this out there about SIGT. The SIGT team is going to have to fix the problems described should they exist, or make some other changes if they don't. Whatever is done needs to be sold to people as a faster & more efficient SIGT. They have to do something and make it very public they did something in order to rebuild confidence and move beyond this.

Is this true that signatum is not scalable? That they are using an out if date codebase? This makes me nervous for the long term if this is true

The project is open source and you can check the source code online. https://github.com/signatumd/source. Appears that Sigt is using leveldb for backend database, specifically version 1.17, released in May 2014. As of now the newest version is 1.20. Per Cryptopia guys said this db was outdated, true. They say it's been outdated for 6 years, false. Was this causing the Cryptopia wallet problem, uncertain but yes according to their response. Will this outdated db cause any other problems, uncertain. Are there any other coins using the same db with the same version and have no issues so far, don't know but worth looking around(maybe I will later). Should the devs update this db, should.

That is as far as I know. Would really like to hear more from the devs and sigt community. Should you sell or hold is up to you.

Where does it say 6 years in his statement ? I only see where he says it is extremely outdated.

Hi,

The SIGT wallet is now available for withdrawals. Any pending deposits will be processed as soon as we can, you will need to withdraw these again ASAP once they are processed. The markets will remain closed and SIGT is still going to be delisted.

SIGT is based on a 6 year old code base and does not cope with the volume of transactions and addresses generated by it's community. It doesn't have an active developer and a resolution to this problem is unlikely.

Please check our News page for a more in depth statement: https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/News

We apologize for the delay in getting SIGT back up however we were dealing with issues out of our control. Good luck with your future trades!

Please be patient while we finish working on the wallet and try not to log anymore tickets, we love talking with you guys but it does make it more difficult to get your issues resolved when we are flooded with tickets ;-)

Thanks,
Jerry
Cryptopia Support

Jerry was referring to the code base. Not specifically the DB version.