Everyone active in the world of cryptocurrency is well aware of Bitcoin’s scaling problems. The capacity per block compared to the number of transactions every 10 minutes is insufficient. Unfortunately, it does not appear Bitcoin – or other cryptocurrencies are the only ones suffering from capacity issues. Poloniex, the world’s largest altcoin exchange, is dealing with their third outage in less than a week.
Poloniex Is Getting Worse over Time
Altcoin traders will be rather frustrated right now, as the Poloniex exchange is once again dealing with problems. Over the past two weeks, these problems have become far more prominent than ever before. It is true a lot of new money enters the cryptocurrency world on a daily basis, which means there will be more trading activity.
What is rather difficult to comprehend, however, is how Poloniex seemingly can’t scale by any means. An unexpected growth in customers was to be expected at some point, yet it seems the team has been caught off-guard. What is even more troubling is how they are seemingly unable to overcome the capacity issues their exchange has been dealing with for quite some time now.
Granted, Poloniex has informed the public they had to mitigate two DDoS attacks this week. There are a lot of questions regarding these alleged attacks, however, as people start to see a major conspiracy theory unfold before their eyes. It is also – probably coincidental – the third time Poloniex becomes unresponsive during high-frequency XRP trading. Once or twice can always happen, but three times in a week seem to hint at a bigger underlying issue for the exchange.
As one would expect during such an outage, performing any type of comprehensive trading is impossible. Poloniex users can’t create buy and sell orders half of the time, let alone cancel existing trades. This will mess up a lot of trading pairs until the issues are resolved, that much is evident. Additionally, those involved in Poloniex margin trading may see some rather negative results as well in the next few hours.
All of this goes to show centralized exchanges continue to pose a very big problem and liability for cryptocurrency as a whole. Since the markets are at the mercy of whose order gets through and whose doesn’t, anything can happen until Poloniex can get their platform on the rails again. It is anybody’s guess as to when this will happen. A lot of altcoin traders may want to look for alternatives sooner or later, though, as it is impossible to access funds during these outages as well.
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The site is a joke. It’s been weeks and weeks now and the problem has only gotten worse. Their front end code is running on a jQuery version from 2014, so clearly not much effort is made to keep things up to date there. Lord knows what the back end looks like. They are making 1000’s if not 100s of 1000’s of dollars in trading fees every day, but somehow cannot manage to find their way to fixing this issue.
they made 1.2million dollars in trading fees over the last 24h if you look at volume
People need to stop using the site. I’m sure they will soon enough, once they’ve been burned a couple of times. I signed up on Bittrex today. I might stop trading alts for a while though. Polo has too much market share and this is affecting the whole market. When the site doesn’t work properly, people panic sell, pumping money into BTC, which drives alt prices even further down. If someone is DDOSing the site, they are probably also shorting alts and maybe having a little bet on BTC too. If the problem is bots, they should block them until they can scale the site.
Where does all the money go?
I think that the site has genuine scaling issues. It would probably be smarter to run the entire exchange through a client-side app, and keep the backend in the cloud.
Just look at the frequency of the trading bots on this site. What’s the point to overload the backend? Amateurs.
Bittrex has no volume, and their site looks bad, not to mention their graphs..
You’d think that a exchange that does the amount of business that they do a day, they would easily be able to buy more than enough servers to handle their traffic. They only have to have 25k to 30k users online and everything comes to a crawl.
There isn’t a hope in hell that they will be able to handle double or triple that traffic, which is what is going to happen as more and more people get in to crypto.
Poloniex sucks. Every time Ripple XRP is at a peak, their convenient and allegid DDoS attacks start, freezing everything up and tanking the price. Even the mods in the trollbox chat ban people from talking good about XRP while they allow others to pump other alt-coin at nausiam. Poloniex sucks ass, horrible sight. Am transferring over all my assets $2000 at a time because that’s all they allow for a daily withdrawal. And they are freezing upping withdrawal limits up to 48hrs so people are stuck in there.
When it’s working properly, I think it’s a good site, recently though, it’s had problems.