Coinbase, the second-largest exchange in the world in terms of trading volume, experienced a major outage on May 14th. At 4:19 am UTC, the exchange announced a system-wide outage that lasted for three hours. However, Coinbase was able to fully recover by 7:34 am UTC, as stated on its status page.
Although the exact cause of the outage is still unknown, Coinbase has assured its users that it will continue to investigate the issue. With a 24-hour trading volume of $2.4 billion, Coinbase ranks second in the market, behind Binance, which boasts an impressive trading volume of over $18.7 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Despite Coinbase’s announcement that its systems are fully operational, some users are still experiencing technical difficulties. This has led to skepticism among users, with some calling for fact-checking of Coinbase’s claims about system recovery.
Coinbase’s status page has also reported “degraded transactions” on May 14th, but the issue was resolved at the same time as the system-wide outage. It is worth noting that centralized cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase and Binance are often the first choice for mainstream users entering the crypto industry due to their user-friendly interfaces. Therefore, any system outages or withdrawal problems can significantly impact the trust of mainstream users in the crypto industry.
Compared to centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) have significantly lower trading volumes. On Monday, DEXs recorded a global trading volume of over $585 million, which is just a fraction of the $4.6 billion trading volume recorded by centralized exchanges, according to Kaiko Research. This further emphasizes the importance of maintaining stable and reliable systems on centralized exchanges.
Overall, the recent outage experienced by Coinbase highlights the need for robust infrastructure and technical reliability in the cryptocurrency industry to maintain the trust of mainstream users.