Auroracoin's "airdrop" causes site crashes and other technical woes

In the world of bitcoin-variant cryptocurrencies, few experiments have gained as much attention as Auroracoin. The Icelandic alt-coin was designed to offer a viable alternative to the nation’s long-troubled domestic currency, the krona, which has massively devalued in recent years. One key part of the plan to launch Auroracoin is the so-called “airdrop” of half of the entire supply of the virtual currency to all of Iceland’s 330,000 citizens via the country’s national registry. Anticipation of the airdrop has allowed Auroracoin to skyrocket in value, briefly knocking Litecoin out of the third-place status it has held for nearly two years. Today, the first stage of the airdrop began … as did several significant technical issues.

Because Auroracoin had been considered something of a fringe phenomenon, many analysts assumed that the airdrop would be met with tepid interest. As soon as the claim page became active at midnight, however, the overwhelming demand caused the project’s presumably well-prepared servers to post timeout error messages. Even with the timeout errors, as many as 2,600 Icelanders claimed their alt-coins within the first four hours. It’s safe to say that there’s demand for Auroracoin

This shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Yesterday, Auroracoin prices were in the $14.50 range, meaning that every Icelander who claimed their 31.8 AUR would have around $450 in free currency. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell what an Auroracoin is worth at the moment, because the flood of new coins, the inadvertent DOS attack caused by the crush of traffic and other related technical issues has caused the alt-coin to drop to a rank of 184 on Coinmarketcap, placing it just below CorgiCoin. The price on alt-coin exchanges is all over the map as the market tries to determine what the actual value of an Auroracoin is.

Growing Canadian virtual-currency exchange Vault of Satoshi has announced plans to support Auroracoin as early as Wednesday, March 26.

As of this writing, only 1.5% of the total airdrop coins have been claimed. There appear to be few Icelandic businesses who are prepared to accept Auroracoin, but that situation could change rapidly if the virtual currency holds its value in coming days. The project has already inspired a few variant national cryptocurrencies, such as Scotcoin, Spaincoin and MazaCoin.