The American crypto exchange has suffered a system outage for a few hours, but assures that customer funds are “safe”.
What’s going on at Coinbase? For several hours, the cryptocurrency giant has experienced a system outage. “Some users may still experience failures when sending cryptocurrencies or withdrawing traditional currency,” the company says on its site, ensuring that “user funds are safe.”
On X (formerly Twitter), the platform mentioned the return of certain services an hour ago, without further details. She always mentions a “difficulty” for users to connect.
This is not the first time that the platform founded in 2012 has made its users experience cold sweats. In March, the bitcoin/euro trading pair suffered a “flash crash” on Coinbase, shortly after bitcoin exceeded $69,000. Similarly, as bitcoin soared in March, several Coinbase users saw their account balances drop to zero. Users have experienced transaction issues, with some customers complaining that they cannot sell or buy bitcoin.
How to explain these problems? Part of the answer could be found in spot bitcoin ETFs. As a reminder, the American stock market policeman (the SEC) authorized 11 spot bitcoin ETFs on January 10, offered in particular by asset managers like Blackrock and Fidelity. Since then, investors have been flocking to these new products. An ETF (or Exchange Traded Funds) is an index fund trading on a stock exchange which follows the evolution of a stock index (or one or more financial or physical assets, such as gold) by replicating the increase as well as the drop in the price of this index (or these assets).
However, 9 spot bitcoin ETFs (including that of Blackrock) have chosen the cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase to hold their clients’ bitcoins. As spot bitcoin ETFs break inflow records, the Coinbase platform could well have difficulty managing such amounts.
Source: https://www.bfmtv.com/crypto/cryptomonnaies-les-retraits-et-envois-actuellement-perturbes-sur-coinbase_AV-202405140368.html
