Following today's crypto-rout which saw bitcoin plunge as low as $10,000, down over 30% on the day, and nearly 50% from its Sunday high of just below $20,000, the HODLers and no longer HODLing and instead are rushing to get out. So, in taking a page from the futures markets, the largest US crypto-exchange, Coinbase, said on Friday that buying and selling was temporarily disabled due to high traffic.
"Investigating - All buys and sells have been temporarily disabled. We are working on a fix and apologize for any inconvenience," Coinbase said on its status website at 8:11am PST (11:11am ET).
Just over 20 minutes later the company added in a subsequent statement that "due to today's high traffic, buys and sells may be temporarily offline. We're working on restoring full availability as soon as possible."
On Thursday, Coinbase had temporarily disabled buys and sells at 5:57 p.m., ET, according to its status website. The issue was resolved within 15 minutes.
Bitcoin had dropped traded about 17% lower near $13,000 on Coinbase as of noon, rebounding more than 20% from intraday session lows. As reported previously, Coinbase's mobile app recently became the most downloaded application in the Apple App store.