Key Takeaways
- Three of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges―Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini―reported issues this morning.
- Coinciding with the outages, the cryptocurrency market saw prices decline for almost all major assets.
- Coinbase’s stock also declined in value by 11%.
Three of the most notable cryptocurrency exchanges reported issues this morning as token prices fell across the board.
Top Exchanges Report Issues
Coinbase was among the first to report degraded performance. The exchange’s support team suggested that the outage was due to a “sudden increase in network traffic and market activity” and said that “funds may delayed and transactions may be canceled.”
Hours later, the site reported that the service issues had been resolved and that it was handling failed transactions.
Kraken also reported a similar outage. It stated that users reported difficulty connecting to its site and mobile app. The issue was resolved roughly two hours after its first announcement.
Gemini, meanwhile, described its problem as “performance issues” and implemented a fix one hour after it posted the issue.
Outages Coincide With Price Carnage
The incident was either the cause or result of massive sell-offs, as several cryptocurrencies went into the red.
The market lost roughly 10% of its value in total over 24 hours, as the total crypto market cap fell from $2.4 trillion to $2.1 trillion. All but twelve of the top 100 tokens reported lost value.
XRP and Polkadot were hit the hardest, with losses of approximately 20%. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 12.5% of its value, while Cardano and Binance Coin lost close to 15%. Bitcoin was hit slightly less dramatically, losing only 9% of its value after the incident.
The incident also affected the price of Coinbase’s public stock, which lost 11% of its value over the past 24 hours.
Despite the widespread losses, some tokens gained value. Solana gained 8.4% for unknown reasons. Most stablecoins, including USDT and USDC also maintained their $1.00 price peg.
Disclaimer: At the time of writing this author held less than $75 of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and altcoins.
