Coinbase experienced record-breaking traffic on the site and a massive increase in trading volume in 24 hours during market fluctuations caused by last week's coronavirus, said CEO Brian Armstrong.
The importance of preparing for the crisis
The San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange said it processed $ 2 billion in crypto orders between Thursday and Friday (Coinbase only saw $ 394 million in volume in the past 24 hours, according to Bitwise).
Last Thursday it also broke its previous traffic record by over 50%, Armstrong said. Where other platforms have encountered problems and outages, Armstrong noted that Coinbase has remained operational, stating that the exchange "over the past two years" has prepared for the eventuality of a major crisis like the one we are experiencing today.
"This hard work contributed to our stability last week, while many platforms, with both crypto and traditional activities, have struggled to keep the volume high," wrote Armstrong, particularly crediting the company's engineering team.
Jesse Pollak, chief engineering officer of Coinbase's consumer division, said the platform has been preparing for a potential crisis since the 2017 upward race, focusing both on the matching engine of the real exchange and on consumer products such as its API.
Some of these jobs included a horizontal climb to the ends of the database, said Pollak. The company said it was working on its databases to allow multiple reads without interrupting the writes (which means that the exchange can view the data stored on its servers and simultaneously add new data without any operation slowing down the other while the transactions are performed).
Coinbase's answer to COVID-19
This system response comes at a time when Coinbase and other companies are organizing remote work plans due to the coronavirus. Armstrong praised his exchange pandemic response for weeks in a series of regularly updated posts.
Pollak said that although Coinbase employees are currently working remotely (the exchange started implementing remote work last week in response to the COVID-19 infection), the engineering team used a combination of automatic alerts and chat rooms to keep up with traffic spikes.
However, Pollak has admitted that trading platforms are complex and that the lack of obvious difficulties does not necessarily mean that a platform has no problem. “From the point of view of engineering camaraderie, I think it is worth stressing that the scalability of the products is truly frightening.
We worked hard and I think our efforts paid off last weekend, "he said. Do you want to trade cryptocurrencies? You can do it with automatic trading software like Bitcoin Pro. This program is ideal for beginners who have never approached the world of trading, as it allows you to exchange cryptocurrencies easily and profitably.
