EOS blockchain congested due to EIDOS airdrop

According to a Coinbase report, the EOS blockchain has been congested by the EIDOS token airdrop. In a blog post, Coinbase said that it faced problems in processing its clients' transactions. This was due to the congestion caused by the EIDOS airdrop. The exchange has solved the issue by increasing the amount of staked CPU and securing a required portion of CPU time remaining on the network to process the transactions.

This incident has also caused the price of CPU time on the network to surge by more than 100,000% in about four hours. The CPU time price reached approximately 7.69 EOS per millisecond. On October 31, a token named EIDOS was released on EOS, according to Coinbase. Its airdrop involves sending transactions on the network from the token's smart contract. 

Exchanges listed EIDOS/USDT pairs to enable users that received the tokens to sell them for the stablecoin. To sell the tokens, people have leased the network's CPU time to increase the number of transfers processed by the blockchain. This has caused the EOS network to be congested and restrict the number of transactions that users can broadcast to their pro-rata share of total staked CPU resources on the blockchain. The token-related activity is responsible for a significant portion of total activity on the network.

The blog post said:

Currently, we’re observing around 95% of all EOS transfer actions are related to the EIDOS contract.

Users who hold a relatively less amount of staked CPU resources are presently not able to send transactions. The exchange has noted that the situation is only temporary. The exchange is expecting the network to return to its usual state as soon as it is no longer profitable to collect the tokens. 

Coinbase added:

It is important to note that the EOS protocol is behaving as expected, but congestion mode prevents users from having transactions processed that exceed their CPU stake.