Beta Launch University: Phone Verification

Leading up to our launch on Saturday, November 6th, at 2PM UTC, we thought it would be helpful to the community to write some quick-snippet educational pieces on how the sale will go.

First, let's talk about our blockchain-protection mechanism. We all know that NFT launches can quickly result in blockchain congestion, as we’ve seen happen with just about every major drop.

At ADA Handle, we take this matter seriously. We know that block-space is precious, and while we would love to pack it full with our own transactions, we don’t think this is best for the network.

In order to prevent congestion from our beta sale (as well as support as fair a launch as possible), we’ve implemented a queuing solution, wherein users are serviced “First In, First Out.”

To achieve this, we considered several solutions, but the most secure and bullet-proof one that we could create for users is based on SMS authentication. We also felt the barrier to entry here was low since everyone is used to using 2-factor authentication via SMS passcodes sent to their phones.

Our solution works in a similar way:

1. At launch, you’ll navigate to our website on this page.
2. Here, you’ll enter your phone number and be entered chronologically into the beta sale queue.
3. For increased privacy, these phone numbers are immediately discarded at the end of the session and the community will be able to verify this from our open-source code (to be released).
4. After entering the queue, our systems will monitor the blockchain and as long as the average load of under 80% is detected, we will send batches of access codes to users 20 every 5 minutes. As blockchain load gets full and eventually hits 80%, we’ll automatically pause new entrants while still allowing users to enter the queue in the background.
5. Access codes will be valid for only 10 minutes, after which they will expire and users will need to re-enter the queue. So make sure you use them as soon as you get them! Once submitted, you’ll receive access to the minting engine for 30 minutes.

While this method hasn’t been tested on a real beta-launch yet, we believe that this will serve as a beta-sale example in the NFT space, and we are open sourcing the entire code for future projects to leverage on.

We believe that if more projects work in the same manner, NFT drops will become fairer, more organized, and will prevent a single project from using the entire blockchain bandwidth.