Prior to now decade, few corporations have skilled the identical meteoric rise as Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN). With a market cap of $75 billion, it’s the market chief in North America, and in each bull run, it transforms right into a fee-generating machine.

But, regardless of large revenues and earnings lately, Coinbase continues to be experiencing inconvenient outages and is struggling to take care of surges in demand. The newest instance of this manifested throughout the launch of the Trump meme coins when U.S. President Donald Trump and First Girl Melania Trump launched back-to-back tokens on the Solana blockchain.

Coinbase customers eager to get in on the motion skilled waits of as much as 48 hours, and transactions stalled for 20+ hours in lots of circumstances. After the frenzy had died down, CEO Brian Armstrong took to X (previously Twitter) to elucidate what occurred. He stated his firm wasn’t ready for the sudden surge in customers and can be working to up its recreation on Solana.

Coinbase has a problematic historical past in bull runs

The latest Solana debacle isn’t the primary time Coinbase has dropped the ball at a vital second. In the course of the 2020/2021 buying and selling season, it buckled under pressure quite a lot of occasions. Listed below are a number of the memorable situations:

April 29, 2020 – Coinbase went offline as BTC surged previous $6,000, irritating merchants who wished to capitalize on the value motion.
Could 9, 2020 – One other outage occurred simply days earlier than the BTC halving, a time of heightened market curiosity.
June 1, 2020 – Coinbase went down again as BTC spiked to $10,000, stopping customers from shopping for or promoting throughout a key rally.
January 29, 2021 – A large outage occurred as Dogecoin (DOGE) spiked 300% because of the retail frenzy fueled by WallStreetBets.
Could 19, 2021 – One of many largest crashes in digital forex historical past (BTC dropped from $43K to $30K in a day), and Coinbase struggled with downtime, irritating merchants who couldn’t react rapidly.
October 27, 2021 – Shiba Inu (SHIB) skyrocketed, and Coinbase had delays, exhibiting its recurring points with dealing with surges in memecoin curiosity.

These outages and freeze-ups virtually at all times happen throughout vital market occasions and heightened volatility. Whether or not a preferred coin is surging or crashing, Coinbase struggles, leaving customers annoyed they’ve missed out on the motion.

But, outages throughout necessary moments aren’t the one factor plaguing Coinbase. There’s an equally regarding development unfolding.

Can Coinbase honor cashouts?

Social media is awash with claims about Coinbase account freezes. Seemingly, many customers have skilled account freezes when attempting to money out massive quantities, main some to query if Coinbase can honor cashouts or whether or not it’s stalling for time.

Those that have been concerned within the digital currency and blockchain industries for a decade or extra need to ask: is that this financial freedom? What’s the level of blockchain tech if company third events like Coinbase can freeze accounts, withhold funds, and maintain up transactions by failing to scale?

Is it maybe the case that Coinbase backed small block BTC, crippling the effectiveness of the unique Bitcoin protocol, as a result of it noticed a chance for itself to behave as a layer-two gatekeeper, making huge earnings within the course of? And isn’t this simply outdated wine in new bottles if that’s the case?

How can this preserve taking place each cycle?

It’s time to face the reality: there’s no sensible motive why Coinbase should continue to face these issues. It’s actually not a useful resource scarcity as a result of its final reported income of $1.13 billion and web revenue margin of 6.69% leaves loads of cash to put money into infrastructure.

So, what’s it then? Maybe Coinbase’s priorities are unsuitable. As an alternative of itemizing countless rubbish tokens to generate extra buying and selling charges, perhaps it ought to concentrate on scaling its tech stack and making ready for the following surge.

We’re nonetheless removed from mass adoption of digital currencies, however we’re getting nearer with each cycle. The extra new customers encounter issues like Coinbase repeatedly creates, the longer that can take.

Watch: Bringing the Metanet to life with Teranode

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