Users of the Cryptsy digital currency exchange were likely sweating upon logging in and seeing incorrect balances listed on their accounts Wednesday night into Thursday. As is common in the bitcoin community, a number of of the site’s traders took to social media to report of their findings, leading some to question whether the service was compromised.
Turns out it wasn’t.
Cryptsy has published a post-mortem report on their blog with an explanation as to what was causing inaccurate client balances. It started with what was a plan to make their system more efficient:
“As we have grown, the one ledger was getting quite large and we started to see some performance issues,” the company writes. “About a month ago it was determined we would move to a per currency based ledger system, meaning for every currency in our system it would have it’s own ledger.”
The day of the move was yesterday (Wednesday), and according to Cryptsy, the “move required modifications to [their] audit program to look at both the main ledger and currency ledger while we moved the data.”
As Murphy’s law would have it, things didn’t go accordingly.
“The modifications to the audit program did not work as expected as many of the data migrations took longer than anticipated. This resulted in inaccurate user balances.”
The company’s response to the issue was to turn off withdrawals and proceed with the ledger migration. In doing that, inaccurate balance reporting was affecting the service’s trading activities, which is when Cryptsy made the call to halt trading until the migration was complete.
“After the migration was completed, we ran a full system audit for every user to ensure accuracy of balances,” the company said. “We are now on the new ledger system and everything is working normally.”