If there is one thing to take away from this weekend, it is how some centralized cryptocurrency exchanges are absolutely abysmal. Over the past few days, it’s become pretty obvious Kraken has a lot of problems it still hasn’t sorted out. Problems like these have been documented for many years now, and many complaints can be found all over social media. We can only hope decentralized exchanges take off sooner rather than later.

Kraken Ruins a fun Trading Weekend

It is well known in the cryptocurrency world that several of the bigger exchanges have horrible infrastructures. It is never fun for traders to see sites go down, APIs become unresponsive, and trades fail to execute. After multiple years in business, one would expect big exchanges to have overcome these problems. Sadly, that is not the case, as things only seem to get worse as time progresses.

In the case of Kraken

For a multi-million dollar company, Kraken has showed the cryptocurrency world how not to run a proper exchange. During the weekend, a lot of traders suffered from issues which have been prevalent for many months, if not years, already. Slow loading speeds, HTTP errors, trades failing to execute in time, API issues – all of these problems are almost a daily occurrence on the Kraken platform. It is a very sad situation which never seems to improve.

It is hard to pinpoint the exact cause of these problems, though. Kraken had built up a solid reputation as one of the first major Bitcoin exchanges out there. Unfortunately, it seems its team has become increasingly lackadaisical when it comes to serving its clients. It is certainly possible Kraken has seen an influx of new users, but these issues were present when Bitcoin was under US$1,000 as well.

It is evident a lot of people will switch to other exchanges sooner or later. Unfortunately, Kraken is not the only platform dealing with issues of this magnitude. Particularly when it comes to EUR-based trading, the number of viable alternatives is pretty small right now. Coinbase is an option, but that company isn’t without its flaws either. GDAX is an option well worth considering, but it does not offer all the trading pairs people may need at this point in time.

Sooner or later, these issues will cause even bigger problems for platforms such as Kraken. Centralized exchanges have always been a problematic entity in the world of decentralized cryptocurrencies. We need decentralized trading solutions sooner rather than later. Any weak links need to be eradicated from the cryptocurrency space, especially if they have to do with centralization of some sort. Until then, Kraken users have the choice of enduring these issues or moving to a different platform altogether.