BNS, the Blockchain Name System on Bitcoin via Stacks, had a surge of activity over the past weeks with sports of >13,587 active registrations in the course of 6 days, bringing total registrations to >96,000 and growing rapidly. A significant portion of these were done through btc.us and unfortunately, the payment processor was not configured for this amount of activity.
The payment processor for BTC.US that offers Stripe and Coinbase support for USD and BTC payments were able to support close to 1,000 registrations. Roughly 471 registrations had to be refunded to users due to the names being registered via STX on other sites ahead of the payment processor, and due to transactions going stale because of the recent network congestion.
BTC.US protects folks from double registering names that are processing, but can only do so on the front-end. Under it all, BNS is a fully open source and decentralized protocol that anyone can build on. Independent services such as STX.Name offer alternatives for registering names, and in some instances folks were able to transact on alternative services that provided registration ahead of the payment processor fully registering them. There is no relationship between BTC.US and STX.Name or other such services, and the systems do not connect with one another beyond both being built on BNS.
Any customers who transacted via USD payments in Stripe and who did not receive their names have been refunded. Coinbase Commerce supports BTC payments but is an early product in Beta. There are ~65 name registrations that were processed via BTC that need to be refunded. If you paid in BTC for your .btc name and have not since received it, we need to hear from you at [email protected] with 1) the coinbase TXID for the request and 2) a BTC address under your control to send you a refund. Thank you for your early support of .btc names. Please email [email protected] with any questions.