On February 13, 2018, Narrative announced their public sale will be rescheduled due to minor complications encountered whilst switching the launch of their public token sale from the Ethereum blockchain to the NEO platform.
Narrative opted to switch their token sale platform due to NEO’s lack of transaction fees, ability to scale to 10,000 transactions/second, flexible software development environment, delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerant (dBFT) consensus method, potential resistance to quantum computing, and the general token sale experience. Additionally, Narrative adopted more stringent Anti-Money Laundering (AML)/Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements.
On February 13th, the creative economy blockchain took notice of what appeared to be data inconsistencies of Narrative tokens (NRV) across NEO nodes. Narrative had been coordinating with NEO.org, City of Zion (CoZ), and Red4Sec – a firm that has audited NEO and other NEO-based projects – in preparation for the public token sale.
What went wrong?
The NRV token smart contract was published on the NEO MainNet on February 8th, 2018 for the private pre-sale. However, the private pre-sale NRV tokens were not delivered to investors Neon Wallets. In each case NRV tokens showed a zero-balance in the Neon Wallet, even though the transactions were properly displayed on neotracker.io. Due to similar issues with the Neon Wallet in other token sales, the Narrative team initially believed it was an issue with the wallet.
On February 11, 2018, two days prior to the initial public token sale date, the team “ultimately determined that there was a discrepancy between NEO node data (via JSON-RPC calls) and other nodes such as neotracker.io and neo-python.” After many efforts to find a solution, Narrative decided it was in the best interest of investors to delay the public token sale.
Eventually, the development team theorized the issue was caused by a “discrepancy in processing behavior between NEO nodes that caused some token sale contributions to fail on main NEO nodes but succeed on other nodes (such as neo-python and neotracker.io).” Upon positive diagnosis of the issue, a fix on the neo-python side was put into place right away. Fixes are still ongoing for neotracker.io.
29 different pre-sale contributors invested 50,550 NEO; 20,220,000 NRV tokens should’ve been minted, but only 9,727,000 NRV tokens were minted because of the technical issues.
How will Narrative will fix the issue?
The Narrative team will deploy a new smart contract, which will mint the entirety of the tokens that were originally suppose to be minted. The original smart contract will be abandoned, and the 9.7 million minted tokens are now rendered useless. Instructions will be provided to pre-sale contributors on how to update their Neon Wallets and remove the now-defunct NRV tokens delivered by the old smart contract.
All excess NEO contributions have been refunded by the Narrative team, and the team highly suggests that investor’s ensure they’ve upgraded to the latest Neon Wallet to avoid contributing to the old smart contract.
Narrative acknowledged their gratitude to the NEO and City of Zion teams for their assistance, saying, “It really is a tribute to the community just how quickly the team converged and gave focus to this issue.”
Next Steps
The token sale has officially been rescheduled to take place on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 at 5pm UTC, and will close on March 29, 2018 at 9:00 pm UTC.
As a community reward, Narrative will airdrop 20 NRV tokens to investors who had registered for the NRV token sale prior to February 13th, 2018, and who participate in either the private pre-sale or public sale.
Registration and KYC will be reopened in anticipation of the token sale. To register, visit the token sale page and allow up to 48-hours for the whitelisting to process.
Pricing and bonus structure from the original token sale will remain unchanged.
For more information about Narrative visit their website, community forum, Twitter, or Telegram.
About The Author: Dylan Grabowski
Dylan is a reformed urban planner with a passion for covering the Neo ecosystem. His objective as a writer for Neo News Today is to report news in an objective, fact-based, non-sensational manner. When not behind a computer screen, he can be found in the mountains rock climbing. Find Dylan on Twitter (@GrabowskiDylan).
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