schain declares more than ten hops
The declared path has more than ten nodes, which is far longer than a real supply path.
What it means
The SupplyChain object declares more than ten nodes. Real paths run to a handful of hops: a publisher's SSP, perhaps a reseller, perhaps an exchange in front of the bidder.
Why it matters
Every hop has to be independently authorised in that system's sellers.json for the chain to verify, so a very long path is both expensive to audit and unlikely to be genuine. In practice it is usually a concatenation bug where a forwarder appends the upstream chain twice, and occasionally it is a laundered path.
How to fix it
Log the chain at each hop and find the point where the node count jumps. Appending should add exactly one node per system, never splice two chains together.
Example that trips it
{ "nodes": [
{ "asi": "hop1.example", "sid": "1", "hp": 1 },
...
{ "asi": "hop11.example", "sid": "11", "hp": 1 }
] }Eleven hops. The ceiling is ten, and chains this long are usually a sign the schain was appended twice rather than a genuinely deep resale path.
Check your payload
Paste a bid request or response into the tester to see whether this code fires against it, or gate on the id in CI with the CLI: the id is stable, wording is not.
Back to the full diagnostic code reference.