ICO Delayed by Ethereum's CryptoKitties Congestion

Transactions supporting the popular CryptoKitties app are continuing to congest the ethereum blockchain, a state of affairs that has spurred at least one startup to briefly postpone its planned initial coin offering (ICO).

The token sale for SophiaTX, originally planned to start on Dec. 5, has been pushed back to ensure an orderly sale, the team behind the project announced today. SophiaTX, which is developing a blockchain platform for business-to-business use cases, said it will hold its ICO on Thursday, Dec. 7.

The problem, the team said, is that the activity around CryptoKitties – an ethereum-based app that uses tokens to represent digital cats that can be traded, exchanged or bred to create more e-pets – has effectively clogged up the blockchain.

As a result, users – including those trying to participate in token sales via the ethereum network – are stuck with longer wait times given the plethora of transactions associated with the CryptoKitties app.

"We have decided to delay the [token generation event] start by 48 hours because a very large number of participants will use ETH during and it would be a major disappointment if their attempted contributions wouldn't be processed timely and that would result in a significant backlog of transactions with very long waiting times," they said in a statement.

It remains to be seen whether the interest around CryptoKitties will lead to similar decisions. Statistics from ETHGasStation.infohttps://ethgasstation.info/index.php, a network data provider, suggests that the network congestion has eased somewhat compared to yesterday,

Cats waiting in line image via Shutterstock