Cryptoverse Doubts Coinbase’s Upgrades After Another Incident

The Cryptoverse is not happy after the major crypto company Coinbase was forced to disable trading yet again, this time on Coinbase Pro, while bitcoin (BTC) made a big step upwards – as the exchange’s previous fixes apparently didn’t do the job.

At around 23:00 UTC Tuesday night, Coinbase announced that they are investigating “an issue” on Coinbase Pro, a professional crypto trader-focused platform, and that they temporarily disabled trading. Per the status update section of the website – which shows previous issues as well – “this incident affects: Websocket Feed, Coinbase Pro FIX API, and Coinbase Pro REST API [application programming interface].”

At around 5:30 UTC Wednesday morning, Coinbase said that “a fix has been implemented and we now believe this issue to be resolved.” Trading on the order books for Coinbase Pro has been resumed “with minor exceptions.”

No further details have been given on the nature of the issue, what the fix is, or what the exceptions are – as it seems that a post mortem report is not out yet – but the Cryptoverse seems to have grown suspicious of Coinbase’s issues, given that this is not a first one this year alone. Many commenters are questioning if these fixes that Coinbase has been implementing are working if the problem, or similar issues, persist during periods of high market volatility.

As a reminder, after experiencing issues during March 12, known as Black Thursday, Coinbase said it had introduced “transaction batching” for bitcoin in order to reduce the load on the network. It then suffered partial outages in April and May, after which they rolled out several updates including changing their database deployment topology to reduce overall connection count and introducing safeguards that would allow the team to contain the impact of future database failures to “as small a subset of requests as possible.”

Then in August, the exchange said that “a spike in transaction fees” on the Ethereum (ETH) network caused delays for users attempting to move funds.

“Can’t recall how many times they have had to blog about how they are sorry for the crashes during high traffic and how they upgraded to prevent it in the future,” said ‘Defusion55’ on Reddit, calling the repeated events “shady”. “Always crashes without fail during fast traffic. Always.”

Bitcoin’s price jumped 3.7% in the last 24 hours to the current (8:49 UTC) price of USD 13,657. At one point, it climbed to USD 13,834 – the highest price it’s seen since January 2018.

But some residents of the Cryptoverse have brought up again the theory that Coinbase’s issues are intentional, wondering what Coinbase gains from higher fees and preventing users from selling at high prices. Earlier in June, analyst CryptoWhale apparently joked that the exchange “has an algorithm built in so anytime [there’s] a 500$+ move in a short period of time, their servers automatically go offline.”

Cryptonews.com has reached out to Coinbase for a comment.
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