In what seems like an update that was a long time coming, Bittrex’s $ADA wallet is up and running once again, processing deposits and withdrawals with the required updates to the Cardano protocol. The same was announced by Richie Lai, Co-founder and CIO of Bittrex, on Twitter.
Yes it has happened… $ADA wallet open and processing deposits and withdrawals again. Apologies for the incredibly long delay and thank you to the Cardano team for working with us… if issues arise, we will put the wallet back in maintenance. @BittrexExchange
— Richie Lai (@richiela) September 27, 2020
After the announcement, Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOHK, was quick to address members of the community about the significant and long-awaited update to the Bittrex wallet, describing it as “the oldest wallet and most broken of all the wallets,” running on some very old and bad code.
According to Hoskinson, the code in question had been worked on by engineers who are no longer associated with the project anymore, a contingency that made the process of updating the code exceedingly difficult.
Of course, users of the Bittrex wallet are no stranger to the issues it has had in the past. In fact, many have taken to Reddit to express their concerns over the inadequacies with Bittrex, with some claiming that they only use it due to the inaccessibility of Binance and Kraken in their geographical location.
The lack of urgency with respect to updating the $ADA wallet was underlined too, with one user going on to say,
“Bittrex is taking longer to update Cardano to Shelley than any other exchange. While I can understand some delay, I absolutely condemn them for total lack of communication. We deserve some update. Currently, they have millions of ADA locked up and no word on how long before release. VERY poor customer service.”
Indeed, the new tech update, which was a combined effort by Bittrex and Cardano’s developers, was much required as Cardano is preparing to head into a new Epoch. In just 5 days, the network will further move to decentralize by 38%.
Soon we'll be heading into a fresh #Cardano epoch. Meaning it's time to decentralize by another couple of clicks. In epoch 220, 36% of blocks will be minted by community pools. And just 5 days from now, we'll move to 38%. Thanks as always to the SPO community @Cardano pic.twitter.com/TUJSRwvi7K
— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 27, 2020
While these updates to Bittrex were extremely necessary, they are not particular to Bittrex alone but are universal. As a result, each user of the Daedalus wallet will benefit from the implemented updates going forward. The exchanges that have migrated to Shelley already have much better infrastructure when compared to those that are on Byron. As use and utilities scale on Cardano, the management will see a much smoother transition towards Goguen.
In a rapidly evolving ecosystem, long downtimes for infrastructure upgrades are not well received by users. The lesson in the present case, therefore, can be the importance of being uniform in the process of exchange updates.
