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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