Firmly in the saddle – Coinbase with no failures so far during Bitcoin’s high flight
The major crypto exchange is currently running without any notable problems despite the high trading activity around Bitcoin.
The crypto exchange Coinbase has withstood Bitcoin’s (BTC) storm run to 41,000 US dollars, after the cryptocurrency had already climbed to 40,000 US dollars on Thursday.
The US crypto exchange is known for often having outages during periods of high trading activity. These outages have caused significant losses or missed opportunities for Bitcoin Lifestyle users of the trading platform, as they have been unable to use Bitcoin’s price movements to their advantage.
As Cointelegraph reported yesterday, Coinbase has bought trading service Routefire, which is developing mechanisms to improve the execution of crypto trades. This may allow the crypto exchange to handle increased trading activity all the better in the future.
At the time of going to press, Coinbase had not yet been affected by any significant outages during the current surge in the crypto market. On Thursday, however, Coinbase Pro, the trading platform for professional traders, experienced temporary connection problems, which were quickly resolved.
Coinbase is not the only crypto exchange to experience problems during high trading activity
Its big competitor Binance also regularly goes down when Bitcoin experiences strong price movements. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao had stated in December 2020 that a price gain of 5% alone triggers a 30-fold increase in trading volume for Bitcoin, which in turn can lead to significant delays on its own platform.
The surge above the US$41,000 mark has now made Bitcoin one of the 10 largest financial products in the world. The cryptocurrency’s market capitalisation is outpacing big names like Facebook and Tencent. If Tesla can also be overtaken, however, it would still need a big push to 1 trillion US dollars in market capitalisation to beat Google and Tencent. US dollar market capitalisation to catch up with Google and Amazon.
At current levels, Bitcoin is up more than 40% since the beginning of the year. Compared to the prices at the beginning of 2020, the increase is even fourfold.