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IOTA snapshot on Sunday: What IOTA holders need to do before then

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Andrew Munro
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Have IOTA? Take a few simple steps to make life easier before Sunday's 28 January snapshot.

The IOTA team has announced that an IOTA network snapshot will be taking place next Sunday 28 January. This is when the IOTA network condenses the tangle by cutting away parts of its history, except the wallet addresses with value.

If you hold IOTA then that's you – a wallet address with value.

Any pending transactions at the time of the snapshot will be removed and cancelled, so you probably don't want to be transacting IOTA at the time.

What to expect

The only thing to be aware of is that if you log in after the snapshot, your account might show a balance of zero and your transaction history might not be there. But don't worry, your coins are still completely safe.

This is because the IOTA wallet re-loads the tangle to determine your balance each time you sign in, rather than simply "holding" numbers. So with all transaction records except the current values being wiped away, the wallet will naturally have a tough time loading it as usual.

Again, this does not mean your coins are gone. It just means they aren't showing up because the usual method of loading data with the IOTA wallet won't be working on this occasion.

What to do

You just need to follow a few steps.

These steps are basically just how you manually feed the correct data into your wallet, so it can more easily find the information on the tangle.

Before the snapshot

Log in to your official IOTA wallet with your seed. Go to HISTORY, and copy three pieces of information. You can just write them down, copy them and store them anywhere for later. You probably don't need to worry too much about confidentiality. The only thing anyone can do with this information is check how much IOTA you hold.

The three items to record are:

  1. The address of the first transaction made in HISTORY
  2. The address of the most recent transaction made in HISTORY
  3. The total number of addresses

1 and 2 should look like usual addresses (big long strings of numbers and letters), while 3 will simply be a number.

After the snapshot

Log into your wallet with your seed, as usual. Go to the RECEIVE section and select GENERATE NEW ADDRESS. This should be exactly the same as number 1 above, the first transaction in your history. If it's not, then something has gone very wrong.

Choose the options to ATTACH this address TO TANGLE.

After that just keep on generating receive addresses until you get the one that matches number 2, the last transaction ever made in your history.

And you're done!

A basic guide to IOTA

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2 Responses

    Default Gravatar
    CryptoCortezJanuary 29, 2018

    What if you did not do this and we’re holding onto IOTA tokens?

    Are mine worthless now?

    Reply
      AvatarFinder
      JhezelynFebruary 2, 2018Finder

      Hi CryptoCortez,

      Thank you for your comment.

      If you were unable to do the necessary steps before the IOTA snapshot happened, there’s no need for you to worry because your tokens are still 100% safe.

      Just simply follow the steps after the snapshot which is found above. This is to manually feed the correct data into your wallet.

      I hope that helps.

      Regards,
      Jhezelyn

      Reply

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