Major Crypto Exchanges Goes Down as Bitcoin Exceeds US$20,000

Two leading digital currency exchanges, Coinbase and Binance, reportedly went down following the latest Bitcoin (BTC) move to US$20,000. These exchanges usually face connectivity issues due to high demand and influx of traffic whenever there is a price rally in the crypto market. The new Bitcoin price holds quite an exciting time for Bitcoin investors as the leading crypto makes price discovery.

Coinbase, Binance Surfers Server Downtime

On Twitter, a crypto user noted that Coinbase was experiencing connectivity issues due to high traffic. A further glance at Downdetector showed a spike in new reports of downtime on the exchange at 3:17 PM UTC. This was after the cryptocurrency crossed the long-awaited US$20K level.

It’s worth noting that Coinbase also experienced a downtime last month during the market rally. At that time, the founder of the exchange, Brian Armstrong, assured that they will “add additional capacity (both in servers and customer support) to deal with increased traffic.” Judging by this, the exchange may have seen bigger traffic to cause another downtime again, same with Binance.

The largest exchange by market capitalization briefly went down amid the spike in Bitcoin. The downtime was also caused by massive traffic on the exchange, as CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao (CZ) confirmed, saying that they are working to add more servers to handle the traffic.

Bitcoin at Over US$20,000

As Bitcoin broke through the US$20K resistance, a majority of addresses holding BTC were reported to be in a state of profit. At the time of writing, the cryptocurrency is trading at the price of US$20,644 on Coinmarketcap. The surge today also pushed the crypto’s market capitalization to another all-time high this year, thereby strengthening its position as the “king crypto.” At the moment, Bitcoin’s market capitalization sits around US$383 billion.