As some of you might know, I’ve written quite a few articles and essays thus far criticizing social media and what it has become. For years now, I’ve been working to rectify some of those wrongs and bring forth a solution that would allow creators to monetize their content, and earn revenue from their creative output.
Here at Yuser, we’ve designed a system to benefit content creators, artists and musicians, as well as those who want to support this nascent industry by collecting amazing works. We’ve been working on it for many years, mostly flying under the radar as a small, bootstrapped start-up.
Until we didn’t.
In the last couple of weeks, we’ve experienced an unprecedented level of growth, and we’ve had to learn how to navigate it and better communicate with our community. I’m a big believer in transparency, even if it’s hard to reflect on one’s flaws and this is what I’m doing here today.
We attempted to launch the first ever 10,000 generative Avatar collection on the Moonriver blockchain through our own NFT marketplace. This is the first step in releasing a full-blown NFT marketplace for artists who have been sharing their amazing content on Yuser.
October 6th, 2021
As we geared up towards our launch we realized that we had encountered a bunch of issues. Most of them had to do with our own servers not being able to cater to the volume of traffic that we’ve been experiencing.
This isn’t an excuse. To put things in perspective, though, we were getting hundreds of thousands of requests per second, something that had never happened to us before. We’ve stipulated that some of this was bot traffic. It crashed our servers. We paused.
We did what we thought was best and we decided to postpone the sale until October 12.
October 12th, 2021
Having one postponement under our belt, we had been working tirelessly to make changes to our NFT sale process. We wanted to make sure that it was as successful as possible and we also knew that our community was counting on us.
As we came closer towards, we developed and tested rigorously. As the launch time window approached 12 pm, we realized traffic was growing rapidly again but that we could handle it. Right?
We used Cloudflare to deal with the bot traffic hitting our site. We launched.
It didn’t go well.
To make the process as secure as possible to everyone involved, and to fend off bot traffic, we made a decision to include calls to our database and the blockchain in the transaction process. Which essentially means that we were attempting to perform transactions first in our own Neo4j database, and then on the Moonriver blockchain [see graph below].
This seemed like a very good idea for us, because it ensured the optimal security of all the transactions and made it impossible for anyone to front run our smart contracts. It also ensured that internally we would have all the data we needed to be able to add the functionality of NextGems within our own application.
The main purpose for NextGems NFT Avatars is for them to have a utility in the app we’ve already built — Yuser. We wanted to make sure that the assets went to those who could truly use them and therefore we made decisions that placed a lot of load on our own DB.
Another issue that we’ve encountered along the way had to do with the way our smart contract worked. Our smart contract requires the address to be approved to interact with the minting contract. As such we need to sign the transaction on our end. When many people attempted to process the transaction at the same time the returned nonce was the same and that caused the transactions to fail.
We did extensive testing of this entire process and we had not had any issues with our system when running it in a controlled environment. However, once we were on the receiving end of thousands of people trying to mint NextGems, it turned out to be a very different story.
Once the traffic had tapered off a bit, more and more people were able to successfully mint. However, we decided to put our minting on pause because we didn’t feel comfortable letting others purchase NextGems without them being able to see the NFTs that they’d acquired right away.
This project is built for the community. We will not stand for taking advantage of anyone. Even if it means that we have to go back to the drawing board and revise how we do things. We know that trust cannot be regained once lost. As such, we’ve decided to be honest about all of our shortcomings.
We know that the reason you’re with us is because you see the potential of what we’ve built. We know this is the reason we would have totally sold out within 5 hours if our system had worked the way it was meant to.
Yuser isn’t just an NFT marketplace. NextGems aren’t just cool avatars.
Yuser is a fully functioning mobile application available for Android and iOS with its own internal token. We’ve launched the Yuser web app quite recently to allow more of the mobile application functionality through the web interface and so that we could connect easily with the Metamask wallet. For our avatars to have utility on the Yuser app, they need to exist as assets on the blockchain and within our own database so that their usage can trigger particular functions.
The issues that we’ve experienced in a very public way were just a stepping stone to what we know can be the coolest, most comprehensive social app and NFT marketplace out there.
Right now we are pulling all the stops to make sure that we not only deliver on the promise of Yuser and NextGems but also honour those who were there with us supporting us from all corners of the world.
To those who participated in the sale:
- If your WMOVR was spent: you were able to mint NextGems. Our first priority is to fix the display on our website to make sure that you have access to your NFTs. Stay tuned in our Discord for updates.
- If you got a success screen but your WMOVR is still in your wallet: the transaction wasn’t successful and you didn’t mint any NextGems.
- This time around, we were able to collect wallet addresses of those who attempted to mint NextGems and we are actively working on making sure that those wallet holders are recognized and that their wallet addresses have priority when the minting restarts.
We will be issuing more updates soon, and we will be letting all of you know not only how to participate in our sale once it restarts, but also EXACTLY what the changes are that we’re making. Thank you so much for your continuous support, effort, and feedback. We wouldn’t be doing any of this without you.
