While the reason behind the three-hour, system-wide outage remains unknown, some users are still unable to transfer or withdraw their funds from the exchange.
Coinbase, the world’s second-largest exchange by trading volume, suffered a major outage on May 14.
Coinbase announced a system-wide outage lasting three hours at 4:19 am UTC. The exchange eventually managed to fully recover by 7:34 am UTC, according to its status page.
The exchange stated in an X post:
Although decentralized finance (defi) platforms have traditionally focused more on maintaining liquidity and volumes in their respective pools, Ran Hammer, the vice president of business development at Orbs, believes that “the future of defi hinges on liquidity aggregation.” According to Hammer, this shift is evidenced by the emergence of dominant aggregators that optimize trades by […]
In the first quarter of 2024, approximately $43.8 billion, or 76% of the decentralized finance yield market, earned an annual percentage yield (APY) of about 5% in very low-risk contracts. Staking played a crucial role in the resurgence of decentralized finance, bolstered by the Ethereum network’s transition to a Proof-of-Stake model. The bridging sector experienced […]
Circle’s USDC is now available natively on Base and Optimism, and Coinbase accounts can transfer the stablecoin to Base for the first time.
Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) has launched natively on both Base and Optimism networks, allowing Circle account holders to send USDC stablecoin from their accounts to Base or Optimism. Coinbase has also made USDC transfers to Base available, according to a Sept. 5 social media post. Circle claimed that it is working with “ecosystem partners” to develop a system for users to swap old, bridged versions of USDC for the new, official versions.
1/ It’s here. #StableSeptember. The day you’ve all been waiting for - what comes first? How about two launches on the same day?
— Circle (@circle) September 5, 2023
Introducing $USDC on @optimismFND and USDC on @BuildOnBase, two leading L2 scaling solutions for Ethereum built on the OP Stack. pic.twitter.com/v3SgJBZ7qG
Coinbase’s Base network launched on Aug. 9. But at launch, Coinbase users could not send USDC to the Base network from their exchange accounts, nor could Circle account holders. Base users relied on a bridged version of USDC, called “USDbC,” to make U.S. dollar transactions. On Aug. 29, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire announced that a native version of USDC would be made available “next week,” but no specific date was given.
The Sept. 5 announcement states that the coin is now available natively on Base. On the same day, the Coinbase interface started showing an option to transfer USDC to Base.
Despite this official launch, many decentralized exchanges on the network continue to use the old version of the coin. At the time of publication, Uniswap, Baseswap, Aerodrome, Maverick, and other DEXs continue to show the old contract address when users select the stablecoin.
Related: Visa taps into Solana to widen USDC payment capability
The announcement stated that USDC has also been launched on Optimism, providing a replacement for the USDC.e token that was previously used on the network. As with Base, Optimism DEXs do not appear to have been integrated with the new version yet.
Circle has been attempting to fight back after its stablecoin lost market share to Tether (USDT) throughout early 2023, but it also faces increasing competition after the launch of two new stablecoins during the summer. First Digital USD was launched in June, and Binance began promoting it in August. PayPal also launched its PYUSD stablecoin on Aug. 7.
A concentration of stablecoins on a handful of platforms has drained liquidity from others.
In a Tweet posted by user @cryptotutor Friday, a screenshot appears to show a 27% spread between stablecoin Magic Internet Money (MIM) and USD Coin (USDC) trading pair on decentralized exchange, or DEX, Uniswap (UNI). Both have a theoretical peg of 1:1 against the U.S. Dollar.
"Magic Internet Money," joked cryptotutor, as he attempted to swap approximately $1 million in MIM but received a quote for only 728.6k USDC. Others quickly took to social media to complain as well. In another screenshot, user @DeFiDownsin allegedly received a quote to swap $984k worth of MIM for just 4,173 in USDT on SushiSwap (SUSHI).
Swapping $1M in $MIM gives $730K in $USDC on Uniswap
— Tutor (@cryptotutor) January 27, 2022
'Magic Internet Money' pic.twitter.com/CKowe6dwJR
Curve, a popular platform for stablecoin trading, offered its insight on the matter. "Uniswap actually now works much better than what the screenshot shows. Sushiswap is just unsuitable for stablecoin-to-stablecoin swaps always," said the Curve team via a tweet.
During bear markets, investors typically flee from holding volatile cryptocurrencies and instead pile into stable assets that generate fixed income. For example, the amount of deposits in Terra Luna's flagship stablecoin savings protocol, Anchor, which promises yields of up to 20%, has increased from $2.3 billion to $6.1 billion in the past 60 days.
However, the capital flight has also resulted in issues, such as stablecoin liquidity disappearing from exchanges, causing their spread to widen to excruciating levels. In addition, the flock of stablecoins into the Anchor protocol has caused its yield to become unsustainable as there are not enough borrowers to pay depositors' interest.
But despite large fluctuations in the market, Curve appears to be doing better than ever. According to its developers, the platform saw a record trading daily volume of $3.6 billion, with total deposits surpassing $16.7 billion. Investors typically seek to take advantage of the occasional difference between stablecoins' theoretical peg to fiat money or other stablecoins to make a profit.
According to Chainalysis data the number of DEX’s doubled between Q1 2019 and Q3 2021, while the amount of CEX’s stayed around the same.
A new Chainalysis report shows that the number of decentralized exchanges (DEXs) is growing faster than all other types of crypto exchanges. But Similar Web data shows centralized exchanges are far from unpopular, with Binance seeing 171 million visitors in October.
Chainalysis published a report on crypto exchanges on Nov. 11 and provided an analysis by breaking the exchanges down by their business models including DEXs, CEXs, over-the-counter (OTC) brokers, derivatives platforms and high-risk exchanges with minimal know your customer (KYC) requirements.
According to the data, the number of DEX’s between Q1 2019 and Q3 2021 increased more than 100% to sit at around 205 as of June this year. In comparison, the number of CEX’s temporarily increased from around 100 to 120, before dipping back to the 100 region within that time frame.
The amount of OTC brokers also increased significantly, gaining around 50% to sit at the 150 mark in Q3 2021. The number of derivatives exchanges got a slight bump to around 125 in 2019, and has essentially held at the region since, while high-risk exchanges broke out during the middle of 2020 to around the 150 mark, before sharply dropping below 100 in Q3 2021.
“Of course, the number of active exchanges in each category isn’t the only way to judge the health of those categories. After all, cryptocurrency businesses aren’t simply trying to survive — they need to grow their userbases and transaction volumes in order to thrive,” the report said.
Across all categories however, the number of small exchanges has dropped, suggesting the exchange market can no longer support niche players. The lesson? Exchanges need to reach a mass audience, or a small audience of large-scale traders, in order to stay in business.
— Chainalysis (@chainalysis) November 10, 2021
Chainalysis emphasized that the growing popularity of DEXs over the past two years has coincided with the “explosive growth of the DeFi category in general.” The firm highlighted that the total value received by DEX’s grew from around $10 billion in July 2020 to a peak of $368 million in May 2021, marking an increase of roughly 3579%.
Despite facing intense scrutiny and pushback from regulators across the globe in recent months, data shows that the centralized exchange Binance still towers over its competitors.
According to data from Similar Web compiled by Finbold, Binance had the most web traffic out of all crypto exchanges in October with a total of 171 million visitors. The figure represents a 12% increase compared to the month before. Coinbase ranks second with 91 million visitors last month, and had a 31% surge in traffic compared to the month before.
Notably the third most popular exchange is PancakeSwap, a DEX that operates on the Binance Smart Chain, with 25 million visitors and a 14% month-over-month increase. While Bybit sits at fourth with 24 million (down 8% from September).
Coingecko data shows that Binance is well ahead of its competitors in terms of volume, with the platform seeing more than $33.3 billion over the past 24 hours. That figure is more than five times larger than the total of second-ranked Coinbase, which generated $6.6 billion worth of 24-volume.
Related: Binance to spend $115M in France to develop European crypto ecosystem
On Thursday the Wall Street Journal reported that former Binance executives estimated that the firm could be worth up to $300 billion as a publicly-traded company. It is unclear when or how Binance will go public, considering its lack of a formal headquarters. However, CEO Changpeng Zhao said in September the Binance’s U.S. branch was looking at an initial public offering (IPO) in 2024.
