Proceed With Caution

The CEO of Coinbase, a company that I am on the Board of, wrote a note to all of their customers on Friday. That note, which he also posted to his blog,  urged caution in the trading of crypto assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

This is a quote from that note:

Over the course of this year we have invested significant resources to increase trading capacity on our platform and maintain availability of our service. We have increased the size of our support team by 640% and launched phone support in September. We have also invested heavily in our infrastructure and have increased the number of transactions we are processing during peak hours by over 40x.

There may be downtime which can impact your ability to trade

Despite the sizable and ongoing increases in our technical infrastructure and engineering staff, we wanted to remind customers that access to Coinbase services may become degraded or unavailable during times of significant volatility or volume. This could result in the inability to buy or sell for periods of time. Despite ongoing increases in our support capacity, our customer support response times may be delayed, especially for requests that do not involve immediate risks to customer account security. 

The reality is that much of the infrastructure that has been built up over the past seven years to support the trading of crypto assets is struggling to handle the load that the recent excitement over Bitcoin and crypto in general has put on their systems. It reminds me of the days in the mid 90s when all of a sudden everyone wanted to get online and AOL could not handle the massive increase in dial-up customers who wanted to log onto the Internet.

Of course eventually everything got sorted out and we have highly scaled systems that can support the roughly 3 billion people who “go online” every day. But that took some time to happen.

I think we are going through a similar phase of growing pains with crypto/blockchain. And things will be messy for a while. So proceed with caution, don’t get too far out over your skis, don’t invest more than you can afford to lose, and be prudent.