By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 18th, 2024
The Coinbase Pro system glitch sparked fears of hack amongst the exchange’s users as it is seen from reactions to the updated announcement.
Coinbase Pro is back online after suffering a temporary glitch on Monday. The California-based cryptocurrency exchange said via a tweet on Monday, saying it is investigating an issue, which has forced it to disable trading.
We’re currently investigating an issue on Coinbase Pro and have temporarily disabled trading while we look into this. Our team is quickly working towards a fix and we’ll post an update as soon as it is resolved. Thank you for your patience! https://t.co/TJjIEZkH3Q
— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) October 5, 2020
Barely a few hours after this announcement was made, the exchange came back to reassure users saying that they’ve “implemented a fix and are monitoring the results. Trading on Coinbase Pro has resumed.”
The glitch suffered according to the status update on the incident involves issues relating to order placement and settlement. Trading pairs affected basically include BCH-GBP, BCH-USD, BTC-GBP, BTC-EUR, BTC-USD, BTC-USDC, and tons of others and as the exchange noted, all affected books were in Limit Only with the exception of REN/USD, REN/BTC, BAL/USD, BAL/BTC.
As it is common with the exchanges and the incidence of hacks, the Coinbase Pro system glitch sparked fears of hack amongst the exchange’s users as gleaned from reactions to the updated announcement. In order to allay this fear, the exchange sent a security reminder saying:
“Coinbase Support WILL NOT make outbound calls to customers. If you are contacted by someone that claims to be Coinbase Support, please report them by sending us an email.”
As at the time of writing this article, no incidence of hacking or phishing attack was reported.
Coinbase Pro System Glitch Mimicks That of the Tokyo Stock Exchange
Coinbase Pro is not the only exchange that has suffered a temporary system glitch in the past weeks. Coinspeaker reported that Japan’s largest stock exchange, the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) halted trading for the entire day on Thursday, October 1 as a result of a hardware breakdown, freezing buying and selling in thousands of companies in the worst-ever outage for the exchange which also doubles as the world’s third-largest bourse.
While the Coinbase Pro outage lasted barely a few hours, that of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) was not resolved until after about a day or two, an occurrence that strains listed companies’ stocks, with an underlying effect on the economy.
Exchange’s are apparently the life wire of the items being traded on them, either digital currencies or stocks. As cryptocurrencies keep gaining traction amongst users, the activities on the exchange’s, particularly the most popular ones including Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken amongst others are increasingly placing a technical pressure on the sites. While this is likely not the only tenable reason for an exchange’s system glitch, it definitely contributes.
A less frequent occurrence of exchange shutdowns whether temporary or permanent will go a long way in restoring user’s confidence in the safety of using cryptocurrencies.