Bitcoin Forum

Crazy day today with Bitcoin pumping and now cooling off have just gone to check my coinbase account and its currently showing £0.00 total balance.

This has happened before during busy times and it just go me thinking what its going to be like when the bull run really does start and it comes to selling.

Its not ideal when you might want to sell a position but you cant because coinbase cant deal with the volume.

Is there any way around this?

If i was to use advance trade and set sell limit orders for when a coin reaches a set price, will the order go through or will it not due to the exchange struggling?

Firstly, do not use an exchange as a storage wallet. Exchanges can halt transactions at anytime and they do that a lot when the price is going up or coming down sharply. Your non custodian wallet cannot lock your funds, meaning you can check around to know which platforms are available at the time you want to sell or buy and deposit into them.

P2P (decentralized) exchanges would also allow you trade at any point.

- Jay -

This is due to the extra traffic on their platform not particularly due to the shortage of volume cause the value you see under your account is sitting and address somewhere that coinbase control so definitely you should see the balance but if it shows zero first check did you made withdrawal or traded to other coins if not then it's technical glitch will be sorted very soon.

I have 70% of my crypto on cold wallet & 30% on coinbase.

I am not very technical when it comes to all this and its my first bull market coming up.

So what would be the best way of selling crypto when it comes to it? I thought i would have to send my crypto to an exchange like coinbase to then convert to fiat?

Centralized exchange like coinbase and Binance have more volume than other trading platforms so what you did was correct and alternative option is to use p2p where you can sell BTC for Fiat and the volume depends on which fiat you want to convert.

I still prefer the exchanges to convert crypto to Fiat when you are not worried about completing KYC. And as I said if it's a technical glitch it won't last very long but you make sure that your balance is not actually empty due to other reasons like compromised account.

I'm not a Coinbase user but I recently saw on twitter some people complaining about the same, but in the coinbase statement their support is investigating this case by experiencing errors in their trading. https://twitter.com/CoinbaseSupport/status/1762899058060890556

This is the risk of storing assets on exchanges, you have no control over this problem unless the exchange itself does it, honestly from my own experience it has never happened like this, does Coinbase often experience the same problem?

It's a coinbase tradition at this point. It's been happening for years -- Bitcoin rallies and something goes wrong with coinbase lol. Now I hear we have people's balances turning to zero lol.

The workaround is to have backup exchange/s. It's actually pretty common for crypto folks to have accounts in more than two platforms or do you have any specific reason to go all in on coinbase?

They are good however Binance is rocking the game with adding so many new projects on the daily basis. That is why their volume is always high as they just bring on the new users who are invested in DEX projects to CEX by listing it first. I know some low tier exchanges like KuCoin try to do this too however the volume Binance brings is way next level. Kraken is also dropping however I know some people who have been using that just to buy bitcoins weekl.y

You are not the only one facing this issue and Coinbase already replied that the issue will be resolved soon and it's due to the traffic that exceeded their previous volume.

Amid Ferocious Bitcoin Rally, a Coinbase Snafu Shows $0 Balances for Customers (https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/02/28/coinbase-account-balances-shows-0-for-users-post-bitcoin-60k-breakout/)

Technically, it should be through because you already have placed the order before any technical issue so it might be already available in order book and when price matches the order will be executed.

Excuse my language.  But fuck these kind of excuses they make.  I swear they make the same excuse EVERY Halving.  I got it the first time they said it, I understood a second time too.  But how many times does this have to happen before they finally realize Halvings bring a ton more traffic?

It looks like they just do not care.  Otherwise they would be prepared.  Any body who has been around for years could of predicted this was going to happen.

What really happened affected the market capitalization of Bitcoin in a quarter of an hour, as $100 billion was wiped^{[1 (https://www.fxstreet.com/cryptocurrencies/news/coinbase-exchange-crashes-as-bitcoin-price-peaks-above-64-000-202402281841)]}, as Bitcoin fell to $59,000, which resulted in huge losses for traders who had made profits as Bitcoin reached its previous ATH. I am not surprised that this happened on an exchange platform the size of Coinbase this time, and since this happened during this particular time. They have not yet addressed the glitch and the crash in their services and are still investigating the matter. I believe, in the first place, that it was a contrived event by them to create a FOMO in the market to weaken investor sentiment in the bull market. However, Bitcoin is still resilient and has risen again by 1.19% at the moment.

It is just alarming really that a big platform like Coinbase struggles with a large amount of volume just makes me question how they are going to be when the real pumps come in a few months , just not ideal.

It's because of the visitors that are flocking on them. I've seen that even websites like coingecko had a paused because they can't take the volume of visitors.

Expect that many exchanges are going to be like this once bitcoin soar more.

That is the reason why many of these exchanges are being complained about for not showing any data and they have to improve their infrastructures regarding to these surges.

It is not like $100 Billion suddenly disappeared.  Market Cap is just that.  Market Cap.  It does not mean that money is gone or people lost $100 Billion in total.  On paper yes, they 'lost', but then we can also say that all this money comes out of no where every time the charts go boom.

I sincerely believe this is a tactic of Exchanges.  It gives them time to make some big moves.  Imagine you see Bitcoin kicking and Coinbase servers drop.  It creates temporary uncertainty and fear, leading to slowing down the Bitcoin pump.  It gives Coinbase time to accumulate more before the actual All Time High is in the scopes.

This is just my suspicion though.  I may be wrong.  But it is very suspect to me that a company as big as Coinbase with such a long experience will still fail to sustain a big increase in volume, users et cetera.

Unfortunately with all the money these centralized exchanges have been making all these years, they still don't have strong enough servers to be able to handle the increased traffic during big market movements where price either goes up high a lot and quick or drops down a lot and quick. This is why we always see complains similar to this one where their accounts stop working and it is only going to get worse as the price keeps rising up faster and bigger.

The only solution is to use alternative methods of trading such as using decentralized exchanges or try to see if you can find another decent CEX that doesn't go down like Coinbase although most of them are similar.

I think this is not the first time that Coinbase has crashed before there is a huge demand for BTC. It might be a good sign though that we are really in for a huge bull run this year. Nevertheless, I do hope that you don't put all your BTC on a exchange like Coinbase.

You just have to wait before Coinbase returns to normal. I think you can still make a sell position, price is still almost $62k, and if you are looking to take profits before of the huge spike in the price then do it.

I have never used Coinbase before, but this is not the first time that I hear this happens at the most inopportune time. In fact, I think that this is quite common in several CEX (it happened to me a few times in Bittrex several years ago).

Using exchanges can makes things easier when it comes to trading, swapping and selling to fiat, but as other users said before, if you rely on CEX you risk having scares like these.

That is a safe ratio to use if you are using that 30% to trade on the exchange. If you do not use it there at all, then you would be safer just moving everything off it.

Yes, that is the way to sell your crypto when you want to. If you have multiple inputs, you should consider consolidating them into one when fees are low, cause at the peak of the bullrun the tx fees would most certainly be high.
You then deposit into the exchange of your choice and convert to fiat

- Jay -

Most old users use Coinbase because it is one of the first service companies to provide a friendly-use bitcoin wallet, even though it is centralized, and therefore financial operations were easier to do by linking to the main stock exchange. The CEO’s statement about the congetion on the platform shows the amount of traffic it gets. Do not forget that Coinbase is one of the largest, most important and first platforms to obtain an activity license from the United States, and it enjoys great trust from the crypto community.

With the rise in the price of Bitcoin, the number of users will necessarily increase with the increase in the number of users with new accounts and thus more financial transactions such as transfers and withdrawals. Fortunately, the problem is just a defect in the platform’s internal system, and it will not be difficult to deal with it. But it cannot be denied that the disruption that will occur to users is undeniable, and I am not surprised that some of them may decide to leave the platform permanently.

I read that the volume of Bitcoin withdrawals exceeded $100 billion yesterday before the price fell from 64,000 to 59,000, which would have certainly led to huge losses for a large number of investors who were waiting for the price to not stop rising. The flaw in the Coinbase exchange system could be one of the main reasons that led to this decline.

And why must it be that anytime the price of Bitcoin has a fast run to the upside their platform usually crashes? Why don't they try to have a permanent solution to this problem that it won't occur again in the future, I could recall that this issue happened in two different occasions during the last Bull market. This to me isn't a system crash, it's an international act by Coinbase, and from reports I read online, some of its customers lost huge amounts of money as a result of this, and those on open long positions were liquidated during when Bitcoin had that pullback to $60k after that the price kissed $64k.

That's so strange that you faced this issue, till now in my time in crypto I have not faced such an issue that my balance is showing zero, this is a waking call for you to change the exchange, there are plenty of other dexs and cexs that you can prefer to avoid such errors, and talking about limit orders, I can say that they will be executes once reaches.

But no one from here can ensure you 100% but the coinbase support or team can assure it, you should report this issue to them, and try to keep the app up to date, I don't use coinbase, but Binance and I never faced this issue there. And talking about trading volume it was not that much that exchange is not able to handle, I think its not a volume problem but might be an internal problem, technical one.

You should take a screenshot because it's a good promotion against CEX and storing funds at them, even the most reputed ones. People leave funds there in order to be able to sell them quickly or to buy other crypto assets swiftly with them if a good opportunity happens. But if glitches occur precisely when you want to take advantage of opportunities, it defeats this purpose and becomes useless. It just remains risky for nothing at the end.