Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is excited about the meteoric rise of bitcoin. Except that part when the price of digital currencies reaches so high that it creates extreme volatility and puts stress on the bitcoin broker’s system, which is what happened Thursday.
And so Armstrong posted a hey-let’s-all-just-relax-a-moment message on Medium reminding people that investing is risky and that trading volumes are so high that Coinbase’s services might not be able to keep up.
“Despite the sizable and ongoing increases in our technical infrastructure and engineering staff, we wanted to remind customers that access to Coinbase services may become degraded or unavailable during times of significant volatility or volume”, Armstrong wrote.
Users of the popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase have complained about slow performance and problems logging into their Coinbase.com accounts as the price of the digital currency has skyrocketed. The cryptocurrency’s value went past $19,000 on Thursday morning, just hours after it topped $15,000. The value has since settled to $15,698 as of Friday afternoon. The value of a single bitcoin was $5,868 one month ago Friday.
Armstrong then went on with this friendly reminder about investing in digital cryptocurrencies.
“Digital currencies are volatile and the prices can go up and down. Due to the rapidly changing price of digital currencies, some customers may not have sell limits that are sufficient relative to the value of total digital currency they are storing on Coinbase,” Armstrong wrote. “Sell limits are one of the many measures Coinbase takes to protect client accounts and assets.”
He also urged users to make sure two-step authentication was set up, complete any pending identity verifications, understand their buy and sell limits, and ensure their email was receiving notifications from Coinbase.