Significant developments continue to emerge in the cryptocurrency market. Accordingly, Coinbase, the world’s second-largest exchange by trading volume, experienced a major outage on the morning of May 14. Coinbase announced a system-wide outage starting at 07:19 AM, lasting for three hours, and the exchange finally managed to fully recover.
Reactions Continue for Coinbase
The popular US-based crypto exchange Coinbase stated in a post on X:
“While the exact cause of the outage is unknown, we continue to investigate the issue.”
According to CoinMarketCap data, Coinbase is the world’s second-largest exchange with a 24-hour trading volume of $2.4 billion, while market leader Binance has a trading volume exceeding $18.7 billion.
Despite the announcement that Coinbase systems were fully operational, some users continued to face technical difficulties. In response to Coinbase’s announcement, X user Rocket commented:
“This tweet is incorrect as millions of people still can’t withdraw or transfer their assets.”
Numerous users also reported that crypto transfers and cash withdrawals were offline; some users requested X’s Community Notes to verify the accuracy of Coinbase’s post about the full recovery of its systems.
Notable Details About Coinbase
Coinbase’s status page also indicated that it faced disrupted transactions on May 14 but stated that the issue was resolved along with the system-wide outage. Centralized crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Binance often serve as the first point of contact for mainstream users purchasing their first crypto assets due to their simpler user experience compared to decentralized exchanges (DEXes).
Therefore, system outages and withdrawal issues on centralized exchanges can particularly harm mainstream trust in the crypto industry. DEX trading volumes are significantly lower compared to centralized exchanges. According to Kaiko Research, on May 13, DEXes achieved a global trading volume exceeding $585 million, which is only a fraction of the $4.6 billion trading volume accumulated by centralized exchanges.
