Coinbase Hit With Another Bug, User Balances Disappear

American cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase assures clients of asset safety as the network receives another blow.

Second Case of “Zero Bug” Attacks

Amidst the recent outstanding rally in the price of Bitcoin (BTC), Coinbase Inc’s customers have confirmed a glitch on the platform. On February 29, a bug reportedly caused users’ account balances to read an all-time low, which got many of them concerned. The outage was said to have triggered a staggering $100 billion loss in Bitcoin market cap within only 15 minutes.

The incident was discovered around the same time when Bitcoin price surged past $64,000. However, the outage impacted Bitcoin’s price on the platform, causing the price to drop to $59,000. The leading digital asset has recovered significantly since that time and is now trading at $66,484.33 with a 5.84% increase in the last 24 hours. 

There has been a recurrence of the zero balance on customers’ accounts, making it the second time in less than one week. One Coinbase spokesperson thinks that this time around, the bug might just be a display problem.

In addition to the intermittent zero balance, Coinbase confirmed that increased latency has also occurred. To allay customers’ fears, the crypto exchange assured that customer assets have not been jeopardized via the disruptive event. According to Coinbase, investigations are still ongoing and trading on the platform is still operational. 

Is Coinbase Outage Linked to Bitcoin Price Surge?

While it is unclear what could have led to the issue or if it is linked to the surge in Bitcoin price, some entities claimed that such technical issues had happened in the Coinbase ecosystem in the past. These glitches are sometimes linked to sharp moves in Bitcoin. 

At the same time, Coinbase recently had its BTC/USD trading volume dominance print a yearly high of 53%. This insight was provided by Ki Young Ju, the co-founder of the crypto analytics platform CryptoQuant. CoinMarketCap also confirmed that the cumulative volume on Coinbase is at 72,570 BTC equivalent to $4,791,725,299 over the past 24 hours.

Coinbase trading volume dominance in the $BTC/USD markets reached a yearly high of 53%.https://t.co/beKpUVllNj pic.twitter.com/wPoy1f8jGq

— Ki Young Ju (@ki_young_ju) March 4, 2024

A significant growth such as this could have also triggered the activation of the bug that is currently making users’ account balances read zero. While these are mere speculations, Coinbase remains under intense watch by market stakeholders.