The year 2017 has been pretty good for cryptocurrency exchanges in general. With so many new people entering this ecosystem, it’s been evident something would have to give at some point. It seems Bittrex is the first major “casualty” in this regard, as the company halted all account signups about a week ago and has yet to open registrations back up. It will be interesting to see if other exchanges take similar action moving forward.
Bittrex Sees too Much Growth
One could certainly argue the year 2017 has been pretty interesting for all cryptocurrency exchanges. A lot of companies have had to deal with major issues throughout the past 12 months, and it seems things will not improve anytime soon either. More specifically, Coinbase, Kraken, and a few other big trading platforms have suffered from degraded performance across their operations, which is never a good sign.
To make matters worse, a fair few cryptocurrency exchanges have had to deal with denial of service attacks throughout 2017 as well. Although it remains to be seen if these were actual attacks rather than simply large numbers of users logging in at the same time, their infrastructure needs to be upgraded regardless. Unfortunately, most exchanges will only address these issues after the fact, which is never the best approach.
Bittrex has decided to take an interesting approach in this regard. More specifically, we saw the company halt all user signups around a week ago. Although this is anything but a popular decision, it is also pretty clear why the company took such a course of action. It, too, has noticed the influx of new users and decided to take action before things got out of hand completely.
According to a blog post which went up a week ago, a decision was made to upgrade the site’s infrastructure. Its support and backend systems will need to undergo a big upgrade in the coming weeks and months to accommodate these new users. It is a bit unclear how the company will go about things in this regard, but it is seemingly intent on not letting its service degrade. More users trading on the platform means the backend will need to keep up with increasing demand. That is always much easier said than done.
Rest assured a lot of people will be looking forward to seeing Bittrex open up its registrations again. After the issues Poloniex went through earlier this year, Bittrex quickly overtook it as the biggest altcoin exchange. We can only applaud its decision to halt user registrations to ensure the service remains optimal at all times. If other exchanges had taken a similar approach over the past few months, fewer issues would have occurred in the cryptocurrency world.
The big question is whether or not we will see another major influx of new exchange users in 2018. While 2017 has seen very solid growth, it may very well be a fluke in this regard. Despite only being around for just over nine years, it feels as if most people have spent a lifetime dealing with Bitcoin. There is still a bright future ahead for cryptocurrency in general, but there will be some issues along the way to overcome.
