Today January 28th at 4pm UTC (11am EST) the IOTA network (Tangle) will generate a snapshot. There may be degradation of the network performance during this process, which will be finished after approx. 6 hours.
What is a snapshot?
Technical aspects aside, a snapshot removes empty adresses (seeds) and tranfer history. What remains are the seeds with value. This way the size of the network is dramatically reduced and new servers (nodes) in the Tangle infrastructure will be bale to get in sync faster and need less space to save the database. At the moment this process is started manually by the IOTA team, but in the future this is planned to be a fully automated process.
Are my IOTA save?
Yes your IOTA are save. Your value is saved in the tangle and not offline in your wallet. This value won't change and won't be deleted.
But after the snapshot you will see balance: 0 in your wallet.
Wait... what? This behaviour triggers panic after every snapshot. The IOTA system generates a new address for every outgoing transaction. That means if did 5 outgoing transactions with your seed your seed has 6 addresses in total and your funds are on the 6th address. The first 5 will be empty because they aren't as save to use anymore. You can see how many addresses your seed generated in the official IOTA wallet in the HISTORY tab. You should remember the number of addresses and ideally the current address. If you have plenty of addresses on your seed, you should think about generate a brand new seed and transfer your IOTA to the new one. Because in the current state of the wallet, you otherwise have to do some work:
After the snapshot
When you logon your seed after the snapshot your wallett will show a balance of 0.
Go to RECEIVE and click on GENERATE NEW ADDRESS and ATTACH the it TO TANGLE.
Repeat this until you reached the number of addresses you had in your seed before the snapshot. This way you are working your way through your address history until you reached the one with the value (IOTA) on it. If you parked your IOTA on an exchange like f.e. Binance, they will do all this stuff for you.
We all feel this is too complicated for "normal" people use. In the future this process is planned to be fully automated, but IOTA is work-in-progress. You're a very early adopter. Congratulations.
Stuff I try to understand
I tried to get info about the following scenario and will add it later:
- Are empty seeds deleted?
- Can those empty seeds receive transfers after the snapshot or do I need to generate it again by logon my seed?