Coinbase, the world’s second-largest exchange 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. Fortunately, Coinbase was able to fully recover by 7:34 am UTC, as stated on their status page.
Although the exact cause of the outage is still unknown, Coinbase has assured users that they will continue to investigate the issue. With a 24-hour trading volume of $2.4 billion, Coinbase is the second-largest exchange globally, trailing behind market leader Binance, which boasts a trading volume of over $18.7 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Despite Coinbase’s announcement that their 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 their systems being “fully recovered.”
Coinbase’s status page also mentioned “degraded transactions” on May 14th, but the issue was resolved at 4:19 am UTC, along with the system-wide outage.
Centralized cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase and Binance are often the go-to platforms for mainstream users who are new to digital assets due to their user-friendly interfaces. Therefore, any system outages or withdrawal problems on these exchanges can have a detrimental impact on the mainstream’s trust in the crypto industry.
Compared to centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) have significantly lower trading volumes. On Monday, DEXs accumulated a global trading volume of over $585 million, which is only a fraction of the $4.6 billion trading volume generated by centralized exchanges, according to Kaiko Research.
In conclusion, the recent outage experienced by Coinbase highlights the potential risks associated with centralized exchanges and emphasizes the importance of building trust within the crypto industry.