BTCKeyChain/FlickrBad news for Coinbase, one the world’s biggest bitcoin marketplaces. It has declared buying and selling is temporarily disabled following a price rout.
It comes at time when cryptocurrencies are at an all time low, with Bitcoin dropping below £12,000.
Visitors to Coinbase exchange discovered messaged showing the site to be offline at around 9:30am. By 10 am they were back online before suspended some of its trading shortly after 11am.
They said in a statement they are working on a fix and ‘apologise for any inconvenience.’
Flickr/AntanaIt read:
Due to today’s high traffic, buys and sells may be temporarily offline. We’re working on restoring full availability as soon as possible.
Chief executive officer Ross Norman, whose company Sharps Pixley offers gold in exchange for bitcoin said:
The sharks are beginning to circle here, and the futures markets may give them a venue to strike. Bitcoin’s been heavily driven by retail investors, but there’ll be some aggressive funds looking for the right opportunity to hammer this thing lower.
GettyCoinbase’s own CEO Brian Armstrong advised punters to ‘invest responsibly’ which shows just how delicate this whole thing is.
