On Wednesday, after seeing a record high of $11,000 a day earlier, Bitcoin’s price dropped back to $9,000. This happened after many users found themselves locked out of the two largest US-based cryptocurrency exchanges. The digital exchanges Coinbase and Gemini, crashed on Wednesday morning, making it impossible for most of the users to trade in digital currency.
As reported by many users, firstly the websites of these exchanges showed slow performance, may be due to the increased number of users visiting their sites, as Bitcoin crossed historical $10,000 mark. However, some users also claimed that they were unable to log into their accounts. Earlier many experts predicted at that time that a crash is expected in near future, and this looks quite close to it.
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People having accounts on GDAX, Coinbase’s professional trading platform, and Bitstamp, a bitcoin exchange based in Luxembourg, also reported about to being locked out of accounts.
Coinbase, which is considered as one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchange has exchanged over $50 billion in cryptocurrency since its launch in 2012.
Dave Farmer, the director of business operations at Coinbase, told about a partial system outage on the website, as he says,
“The company experienced all-time-high traffic early Wednesday, causing some users to experience slowness.
The website should be fully resolved in the next couple of hours.”
Gemini, another popular digital exchange showed many users a 504 gateway time-out message, which means its servers were not responding to requests.
Meanwhile, another challenge faced by Coinbase is that it has lost a bid to keep the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from seeing customers’ trading records as part of a tax-avoidance probe. According to an order by the federal courts of the US, the exchange must surrender records on transactions of $20,000 or more, during 2012-15.
