Charles Hoskinson released a video on September 7th to update the Cardano community on the state of things concerning issues with ADA coins on Bittrex. There have been “Cascading issues” with the wallet. These are micro issues that are not easily detected but become untenable as they become compounded or “quadratic” over time. This was because Bittrex had been using the oldest wallet version of Cardano- Serokell. New exchanges that listed ADA didn’t have the issue because they had a recent and updated version of the wallet.

The issue is not a security problem but a performance problem, wallets with single accounts will definitely not experience these issues. But wallets that operate at a very large scope and scale with many accounts using the old version of the wallet can have the same issue. He stated that the hands of senior developers at Cardano are on deck with communications with “guys from Bittrex” to solve the backend issues of the wallet. He stated the “light at the end of the tunnel” for the challenge will not only be to the benefit of Bittrex but for all Cardano wallets. Wallets that operate at the scope and scale that Bittrex is operating with thousand of accounts will be able to work seamlessly after the update.  He stated that the update will be “a really cool accident at the end of the process”. He iterated that the issue was not the fault of Bittrex exchange as it was the first exchange to list ADA pairs. The issue was because of the version of the wallet they had been using. The Serokell version had a lot of issues that made it very difficult to migrate to to a newer version of the wallet such as Byron Reboot. 

The team at Cardano had been working together with Bittrex to untangle the issue in August when the Shelley update was rolled out. It was gotten to the point where “everything was working but doesn’t have reasonable performance because there are some areas that have quadratic slowdown point selection that was never optimized because they were hard to detect” he said.

Charles Hoskinson apologized to users of Cardano and that he understands their frustration. He promised to continue to give updates to the community about the issue.

“We know that this is deeply frustrating. This is not a security issue, it is a performance issue on the tail. However, we have not built software which will work at this particular edge case. This is why our senior staff is currently at work on the problem.”

He concluded the video with the appreciation of Bittrex for their patience and all the technical help provided.