Coinbase, Binance Go Down Amid Crash, As Digital Assets Trading Spikes

Well, it was definitely not for the first time that a centralized exchange like Coinbase and Binance are facing trouble keeping up with the spiking trading volumes. As witnessed in the market crash of Wednesday, crypto exchanges had trouble providing their services to the customers as Bitcoin and Ethereum lost almost 40%  of their value in just a matter of 24 hours.

Coinbase, Binance Halted Functions Amid Crash

Not only exchanges like WazirX stopped working yesterday amid the crypto market crash, but the giants like Coinbase, Binance, Gemini, and Kraken also stopped working and were not able to handle the increased volume in the cryptocurrency trading.

Coinbase reported intermittent downtime all morning and Binance halted Ethereum-related token withdrawals. Gemini crypto exchange reported lags in the platform, while one of the oldest crypto exchanges, Kraken noted customer connectivity issues.

In contrast to the centralized crypto exchange giants, decentralized exchanges managed to stay up regardless of the high trading volumes generated by the selloff of today.

Discussing the major difference between the functioning of the centralized and decentralized exchanges, centralized exchanges involve an intermediary in transactions, and instead of registering trades on the blockchain directly, they register in their own wallets.

Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) make use of smart contracts on a public blockchain to run and as long as the blockchain is functioning, DEXs keep on trading.

As reported by the Growth Lead at the leading Ethereum DEX Uniswap, Ashleigh Schap, the exchange was working flawlessly this morning.

Trading Companies Suggest Asset Managers and Hedge Funds Bought Bitcoin’s Latest Dip

The price of the leading cryptocurrency managed to surge from its lows at the levels of $30K to over the levels of $40K Wednesday morning.

Aya Kantotovich, the head of the institutional sales for FalconX revealed:

“TradFi asset managers are buying on our end. We are no longer stressed!”

Several traders also revealed that the derivatives traders offshore were positioned to heavily short gamma meaning sell to hedge.

Evgeny Gaevoy, the CEO of Wintermute, the market-making firm said in a message:

“My money would be on Deribit short gamma guys forcing liquidations and making it even worse for themselves and dragging the whole market down.”