Crypto Exchanges Break (Again), Showing Fragile Market Not Fixed

It’s been a rough two weeks in the crypto world, where as much as $1 trillion in market value has evaporated. Wednesday may be the worst of it, as the world’s two largest digital asset exchanges, Binance and Coinbase Global Inc., suffered service outages, sending Bitcoin falling the most since 2013.

Exchanges are central components to the digital asset world, yet they frequently go down when traffic on blockchain networks gets too high, calling into question their readiness to serve a quickly growing market. At the height of the last bull market in 2017 both Coinbase and Binance often shut users out of their accounts due to internal problems. Blockchain and crypto believers like to think they’re changing the world yet the backbone of the industry is clearly not ready for prime time.