Digital currency startup Coinbase says it paused trading for litecoin and ethereum, a move that came amid a period of heightened price action around both cryptocurrencies.
According to a message posted to its mobile app, âlitecoin and ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled. We apologize for any inconvenience.â The message links to Coinbaseâs status page, which shows a âmajor outageâ for both litecoin and ethereum. An incident report posted to the page states that the situation had been resolved as of 12:01 p.m. EST.
The issues do not appear to extend entirely to GDAX, the companyâs digital asset exchange, although its own status page states that there is a âpartial outageâ for litecoin withdrawals. GDAXâs litecoin market is seeing âdegraded performance,â according to the page, whereas ether trading is occurring as normal.
According to data from CoinMarketCap, GDAXâs LTC market has seen more than $1.8 billion in volume in the past 24 hours. At press time, litecoin is trading at a price of roughly $326, whereas ether is trading at about $636.
Coinbase has been dogged by platform issues amid a period of notable price volatility around bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, a state of affairs that has grown more apparent as the startupâs trading footprint grows. In a reflection of that, the firmâs iOS app took the top spot on Appleâs U.S.-based app store in recent days in spite of the problems, according to reports.
As might be expected, todayâs site problems have sparked a fresh round of criticism across social media, with users taking to Twitter to blast the startup.
The issues also come several days after Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong cautioned about the potential for further outages during periods of heightened trade volume in a post on Medium.
âDespite the sizable and ongoing increases in our technical infrastructure and engineering staff, we wanted to remind customers that access to Coinbase services may become degraded or unavailable during times of significant volatility or volume,â he wrote. âThis could result in the inability to buy or sell for periods of time.â
In anticipation of that, Armstrong wrote that the startup has significantly expanded its customer support team, including phone services for users.
âWe have also invested heavily in our infrastructure and have increased the number of transactions we are processing during peak hours by over 40x,â he wrote.
Disclosure:Â CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which has an ownership stake in Coinbase.Â
Turnstile image via Shutterstock
This article has been updated.