CoinList Exchange Struggles, but NEAR Disaster Averted

CoinList’s second attempt in 24 hours at hosting NEAR’s final token sale saw the exchange once again buckle under a flood of traffic from prospective investors.

NEAR’s final sale before mainnet was originally planned for August 11, however, the token sale was abruptly postponed by 24 hours after investors were left clicking refresh and filling out captchas for 90 minutes while unable to participate in the offering.

Despite CoinList reassuring users that the platform would be scaled to handle the surge in traffic, many investors today again found themselves clicking refresh for nearly two hours while waiting to access CoinList.

Despite CoinList’s near-disastrous performance throughout the sale, NEAR sold out of 100 million tokens worth nearly $30 million within less than three hours of the sale’s commencement. However many wannabe NEAR investors missed out, and many of them blamed the technical issues.

Prospective NEAR investors push back

CoinList’s Twitter account has been besieged by complaints from prospective investors who were unable to purchase tokens, with the account tweeting its apologies to the NEAR community over the past hour:

1/ The NEAR token sale obviously did not go as planned for many of you who wanted to participate. To the NEAR community, we are truly sorry. We’re working with the NEAR team to find a way to make things right for you.

— CoinList (@CoinList) August 13, 2020

CoinList said that “the sale was oversubscribed” and that “a majority of participants were always going to miss out,” adding that the firm is currently “working through a post-mortem” to “ensure fairness.”