Discrepancies with Ecency Delegation API

Since HiveSQL is down, I had to make some changes to some code to accomidate alternative ways to gather data. I have a few bots I run to help out some communities and I already did this work a while ago but never actually deployed the changes as I never fully tested them.

I have tested in the past using Ecency's delegation API. It all looked good, but I never got around to fully verifying it so I never actually updated my code to use it for fail over. Now it is harder to do this as HiveSQL is down and getting delegation data directly from the blockchain is kind of a pain in the ass.

Most people are using HiveSQL for this data because it is just easy. With it down though, it's hard to replace it as you want to verify you have the correct data before commiting to something (ideally, at least I do).

In this case, I help @raymondspeaks with his BroFi bot where it distributes BRO tokens for delegations. The bot queries HiveSQL for how much curation rewards @brofi earned in the last 24 hours, then pulls up a list of who delegates to @brofi and figures out how much they should receive based on past curation plus the additional 10% bonus distributed.

Since HiveSQL is up 99% of the time, it hasn't been a priority, especially since I just do this as a favor to help out the community. Now that HiveSQL has been down for almost a week, I didn't want everyone waiting for their BRO tokens, so I revisited my fail over code and manually sent out distributions to catch up.

Then I noticed there was an issue, one particular user received BRO even though he doesn't currently delegate. It was only 0.01 BRO, so it isn't a big deal but it got me thinking there was an issue with the source of data.

I already have code to pull delegation from three different sources that I know works. I just never bothered to compare their results for accuracy.

I have three functions:

• getHiveDelegatorsFromHAFSQL(account)
• getHiveDelegatorsFromHiveSQL(account)
• getHiveDelegatorsFromEcency(account)

In theory, these all should report the same information. I was curious how far off the api is, so I know what the end result was. For the one user I know was receiving API even though he didn't have an active delegation, I queried the API and looked manually.

The Ecency API reports this:

 {
    delegator: 'bulliontools',
    delegatee: 'brofi',
    vesting_shares: '435957.734106 VESTS',
    timestamp: '2024-01-05T02:41:48+00:00',
    vests: 435957.734106
  }

This is actually accurate, @bulliontools did delegate to @brofi back in January, but a few weeks later he removed his delegation but the API indexer never picked up on this. To see how many other errors there are, I created a simple function to compare the results.

function compareResults(result1, result2) {
    const differences = [];

    // Iterate over result1
    result1.forEach(entry1 => {
        // Find matching entry in result2 based on delegator
        const matchingEntry2 = result2.find(entry2 => entry2.delegator === entry1.delegator);
        
        // If there's no matching entry in result2, or if vests values are different, add to differences
        if (!matchingEntry2 || parseFloat(entry1.vests) !== parseFloat(matchingEntry2.vests)) {
            differences.push(entry1);
        }
    });

    // Iterate over result2 to find any delegators that are not in result1
    result2.forEach(entry2 => {
        const matchingEntry1 = result1.find(entry1 => entry1.delegator === entry2.delegator);
        if (!matchingEntry1) {
            differences.push(entry2);
        }
    });

    return differences;
}

This code compares to lists and adds the differences to an array and then prints the array at the end.

The end result was this:

Differences found in vests values for the following delegators: [
  { delegator: 'fiberfrau', delegatee: 'brofi', vests: '81372.507328' },
  {
    delegator: 'bulliontools',
    delegatee: 'brofi',
    vesting_shares: '435957.734106 VESTS',
    timestamp: '2024-01-05T02:41:48+00:00',
    vests: 435957.734106
  }
]

The result was a very insignificant discrepancy, and has almost no financial impact in this case. It could however have a pretty significant impact if a larger delegation was incorrectly tracked. Moral of the story, whenever possible, try to verify data before depending on it blindly.

Most services on Hive use HiveSQL and don't have fail over methods in place as it is just a pain in the ass to create 2-3 copies of every function when the service is usually available and the methods to retreive the data vary dramatically. If you do use alternative data sources, spend some time doing some sanity checks.

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