I am a part of the engineering team at Origin Protocol, who built and ran this auction. AMA.
Fun fact: within a few days of the auction we beat an hour long DDOS attack peaking at 4.7 million page per minute.
Fun fact: within a few days of the auction we beat an hour long DDOS attack peaking at 4.7 million page per minute.
It seems that many "high value" auctions are just grifters paying inflated prices for their own works to try and drive up the popularity of the NFT market.
Do you do anything to combat this sort of fraud?
At Origin Protocol, we are currently doing white-glove auctions for celebrities and top-tier NFTs. The Charlie Bit Me video is a perfect example. This means that the pool of bidders that can pay the prices that these go for is fairly small. I would think that the problems you mention would be much more prevalent among NFT artists who are looking to make a career out of this.
- Identify the characteristics of the attack.
- Block as much as possible, as far forward as possible.
- Cache as much as possible to minimize load.
- Scale the parts of the backend that are the bottlenecks.
Of course it was a lot more exciting than that during the actual event. :)
DDOS attacks for ransoms are a part of life in crypto, so this wasn't our first time dealing with things. We also load test copies of our sites in peacetime until they break in fun ways, to know what and where the failure modes are.