The crypto exchange could only be reached to a limited extent during the GameStop affair, which had caused criticism that has now been invalidated.

On January 29, users had the crypto exchange Coinbase about problems with the purchase and sale of some crypto currencies reported

This quickly got a bad aftertaste, as the influential trading platform had previously only one day to decide to stop the sale of the shares of the video game retailer GameStop temporary. This was interpreted as a kowtow on high finance, as some hedge funds suffered massive losses from the share pushed by small investors.

„On Friday, January 29th, api.coinbase.com was down between 4:25 am – 9:31 am (PST),“ as Coinbase confirmed on February 5th . „During this time, many of our users received an error message when accessing the Coinbase app, the buying, selling and trading of crypto currencies was only possible sporadically,“ the blog entry continues. Coinbase Pro, the company’s own platform for professional traders, was easily accessible.

The crypto exchange cites difficulties in collecting and converting exchange rates as a possible reason for the failures: “We quickly noticed that the problem was a Redis cluster that provides exchange rates for converting between crypto currencies and local currencies. The provision of these exchange rates plays an essential role because they are required for the conversion and presentation of crypto assets in the respective national currency of a user. „

“Any functions that make use of these exchange rates in the broadest sense have therefore failed. Accordingly, our users could not use many important functions on our platform, ”as the blog entry summarizes

In short: An important function in the background of the crypto exchange did not cope with the rush on the crypto market, which was largely triggered by the hype about GameStop and the affair about Robinhood, and buckled. Coinbase then tried several solutions and was ultimately able to fix the problem, after which the trading platform was back to normal.

Finally, Coinbase discusses several changes IT has made to prevent such an issue in the future. In the past, the crypto exchange had to struggle with failures again and again . In November 2020, Coinbase boss Brian Armstrong personally confirmed that his platform is working flat out to fix all known problems.