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Cryptocurrency exchanges are vital to the success of bitcoin and altcoins. Consumers and investors rely on centralized platforms to diversify their cryptocurrency portfolio. However, it appears quite a few of these platforms have issues remaining online when trading intensifies. Poloniex and Coinbase have had brief outages these past few hours, indicating the infrastructure cannot cope with the demand.
It is not the first time cryptocurrency exchanges deal with issues during intensive trading sprees. Any platform dealing with popular cryptocurrencies has seen an increasing amount of trading volume these past few days. Unfortunately, this also means some services will start to slow down or even briefly go offline in the process. Although issues like these need to be avoided at all costs, it is pretty much inevitable for centralized platforms.
Altcoin Exchanges Suffer Brief Outages Again
Both Poloniex and Coinbase have had brief issues over the past 12 hours. Poloniex is the world’s largest altcoin exchange, generating massive amounts of trading volume. With thousands of users placing orders at the same time, the server gets overloaded every now and then. Thankfully, these issues never last long, and it appears Poloniex is up and running once again.
Coinbase is another exchange suffering from similar issues right now. It is unclear what is causing the brief outages every so often. For now, Coinbase seems to be operating just fine, although there are some complaint son Reddit. Luckily, it appears no funds have been lost in the process and all existing trades have been executed properly.
All of these issues highlight a big problem in the cryptocurrency industry, though. Centralized exchanges continue to pose a risk for traders and investors. Moreover, users store a lot of funds on exchanges, even though they really shouldn’t. If an exchange goes offline for an extended period of time, users will lose access to their money as well. So far, that has not happened for either Coinbase or Poloniex, yet it remains a risk to take into account.
For people looking to buy and sell altcoins, centralized exchanges are the only option right now. Very few ATMs support any currency other than bitcoin. Peer-to-peer trading platforms have yet to warm up to altcoin trading as well. This is good news for centralized exchanges, as they make a lot of money from trading fees. However, they also need to ensure their service remains up and running at all times.
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