Cardano Founder Breaks Silence on Nami Malfunction, Here’s What Happened

Charles Hoskinson, Cardano’s founder finally came up with an explanation for the public over the recent malfunctioning of Nami, a wallet acquired by the protocol to complement the in-house designed alternative – Lace Wallet.

Cardano Team is Salvaging Nami Wallet

In Hoskinson’s statement, he clarified that a team had been put together to look into the issue involving Nami’s implementation of ADAHandles. One of the issues that was identified by the weekend team features the time lag in fetching these ADAHandles.

To put it in perspective, he came up with a scenario where a user is trying to type in handles, maybe from $NFT to $NFTs. It was discovered that there appears to be a delay for the destination to be updated to $NFTs. To salvage the situation and avoid further damages, the team has moved to disable the ADAHandles within the Nami wallet.

The immediate plan is to develop and successfully test a solution but until then, Hoskinson says that the ADAHandles remains temporarily disabled. 

In the meantime, the team is seeking approval from Google as the disabling code has been written and forwarded to the tech company. While they await this approval and amidst investigations of the acquired codes, Nami users were advised to take a few hours’ break.

It is worth noting that Cardano’s Light Wallet Lace, which got a facelift last year, was not affected by the malfunctioning Nami wallet. The Cardano founder sympathized with those who were affected, citing that he understood their frustrations. 

I'm just coming up to speed on Nami. We've put together a weekend team to investigate an issue involving Nami's implementation of ADAHandles.

The one issue that has been identified is a delay in fetching ADAHandles whereby if users are typing in handles, i.e. "$NFT" and then… pic.twitter.com/Iki4vTR34h

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) March 2, 2024

Nami wallet was initially acquired by Cardano to bolster its mass usage in the community.

Nami Wallet and Lace – Complementary Duo

To forestall related experiences, the Cardano light wallet Lace has been getting serious upgrades to boost its operations. 

Then the Cardano team came up with version 1.7 which included features like an update to the multi-staking capabilities of the wallet. Lace vs1.7 also came with some other tools to reduce drift and better insights on staking pool retirement and saturation. Even with the new version, there was still a need for a protocol like Nami wallet.

Cardano needed to migrate its user experience to a codebase that is maintained using IOG’s engineering standards, hence the acquisition of Nami. The protocol has not successfully achieved its goal because unfortunately, the migration takes time. During this time, bugs like the one currently being encountered could be lurking in the acquired codebase. 

From the explanation offered by Hoskinson, one could tell that Cardano is making an effort to get the Nami wallet running as soon as possible.