Coinbase Working On Tech To Avoid Future Outages
- In the post mortem report, from Coinbase’s 1 June incident, the exchange said it’s working on technical changes in order to provide more stability to its platform.
- Personalities from Crypto Twitter have claimed that Coinbase has gone down 11 times in its history during big price changes.
Brian Armstrong, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Coinbase, at Consensus 2019. CoinDesk
The largest crypto exchange in the U.S., Coinbase, is working on technical changes in order to provide more stability to its platform in the future, the firm said in a blog post on Saturday.
The announcement was made in Coinbase’s post mortem from its 1 June incident, when a traffic spike caused severe disruption to the exchange’s service. According to the incident report, the exchange is now ready to implement a “number of improvements” that will allow the exchange’s servers to handle a sudden surge in usage.
The post mortem of the incident reads:
“Around 16:05 PDT [23:05 UTC], the price of BTC reached USD $10,000. In connection with the rising price, we experienced a 5x traffic spike over 4 minutes. Our autoscaling was unable to keep pace with this dramatic increase in traffic.”
It further states that the spike in traffic led to increased latency, which started affecting all of the exchange’s services, and with error reports at the time spiking to around 50%, user’s experienced server errors and timeouts. The firm also pointed out that it was able to redeploy its API to increase the number of machines handling the traffic within 20 minutes.
In order to prevent such issues from happening again, Coinbase is currently working on “pre-scaling”, creating more server instances under heavy load, in order to reduce the impact of price-related traffic spikes. The exchange will also rely more on caching, loading stored version of pages in the browser, from now on. While it is planning to improve its deployment process to mitigate some of the autoscaling problems in the long term, Coinbase has already updated its “health check” system, which worsened the 1 June incident by causing erroneous automated responses.
This is not the first time that Coinbase went down, with it having something of a history with outages during big price movements. The outrage from the exchange’s userbase was so large after last week’s incident, that Coinbase’s Justin Mart had to tweet “We do not purposely take down the site”. With that said, CryptoWhale posted a chart on 3 June, alleging that the exchange has gone offline 11 times in its history during major price moves:
- A little over $13 million in altcoins were sent to crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase in the past 24 hours, which is in accordance with a September court order.
- The court ordered a phased liquidation process, which allows the bankruptcy estate to sell $3.4 billion worth of digital assets over a certain period of time.
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- Coinbase’s Base blockchain was made available to the public on Wednesday, featuring over 100 dApps and services as part of its ecosystem.
- In order to show its capabilities and promote its mainnet partners, Base has also launched an event called “Onchain Summer” that will allow users to mint exclusive NFTs on the network.
- During an interview with FT, CEO Brian Armstrong said that before the lawsuit a SEC staff member had said that all crypto except BTC was security, and should be delisted.
- When asked how he came to that conclusion, the SEC staff member reportedly said “we’re not going to explain it to you, you need to delist every asset other that Bitcoin”.