Yesterday, the Coinbase website and app went down temporarily.
The problem has already been detected and solved, so much so that almost all the features have become available again, although the website has been offline for about 2 hours.
For the time being, only the PayPal payments would still be deactivated.
The company has not disclosed the nature of the problem and so hypotheses about the causes are circulating.
The down has happened just as the price of bitcoin was rising.
Something similar happened in the past, particularly during the big speculative bubble at the end of 2017, when many exchanges, including Coinbase, suffered due to too many users connecting.
This is a very different scenario at this point, not least because the platform has been upgraded in the meantime, although the fact that this down has happened again at a time when BTC’s price was rising suggests that there may be some vague similarities with what happened in the past.
Coinbase down: how to be protected
It is worth remembering that although any centralized exchange may suffer from similar problems, it is virtually impossible for all exchanges to be offline at the same time.
Since it is often at times of high traffic that such problems can occur, it is advisable not to store cryptocurrencies on the exchange’s custodial wallets, precisely because they may not be accessible at a time when so many people are flooding these platforms to buy, causing the price to go up.
Instead, by storing cryptocurrencies on a non-custodial wallet, it is always possible to move them to any exchange if necessary.
Certainly, at times of high traffic, transaction costs are higher, but decentralized networks, such as that of Bitcoin for example, hardly ever go offline.
In addition, it is now also possible to use decentralized exchanges to carry out exchanges, and these have fewer operational problems than centralized ones. However, in the case of high traffic and high trading volumes, fees can also be very high.
