COVID-19 versus Crypto Exchanges

March 12th, 2020 turned out to be a “Black Thursday” for crypto markets. The Bitcoin price was already on a downward spiral. But the sudden drop from $7,860 to $3,867 shook the entire crypto market. And then we stood witness to the worst bloodbath since 2013. Within 13 hours crypto lost 25% of its market cap. Some laid the blame on the institutional sell-off while some held pandemic COVID-19 accountable for the blood-bath.

Whatever was the causal factor, it did stress-test the infrastructure of crypto exchanges. However, despite this, the crypto markets continue to attract more traders and volume continues to grow. It is the right time for the new generation exchanges like StormGain to relentlessly deliver infrastructural excellence.

Recently, StormGain was recognized as the top crypto trading platform by leading business magazine, The European. StormGain platform has been around for almost a year now and has impressed the professional and novice traders alike. While the award-winning exchange offers a 200x multiplier for the popular cryptocurrency pairs, it attracts very low fees and commissions.

Apart from its infrastructural excellence, StormGain provides lucrative bonuses and rewards. And this makes trading in crypto exchanges even more profitable.

But that doesn’t hold true for all the leading exchanges. Here is how certain major exchanges reacted to the price crash and the chain reaction triggered by it:

  • Bitmex – The unforeseen volatility walloped the exchange. As soon as the price dropped, BitMex started the liquidation of positions. When the traders realized they were getting liquidated, they started pushing more BTC collateral to regain the positions. Effectively, this congested the Bitcoin Blockchain.
  • Huobi and Binance – The fiat gateway of both the leading exchanges could not handle the BTC and USDT buy orders. Traders raised concerns over auto-deleveraging on Binance.
  • Deribit – Experienced double outage. One while the market was crashing and next immediately when the market was recovering.
  • Bitfinex and OKEx – Suffered downtimes in late Feb 2020 when the market had started indicating a potential crash.
  • FTX – Suffered from database overload leading to significant order book lag.
  • Gemini – The exchange went offline for 45 minutes on 12th March.
Crystal clear conclusion

The way the exchange infrastructure responded to the price volatility has totally shifted the focus of the debate. Instead of looking for the causal factor, the crypto community needs to fix it’s not so robust infrastructure as it is the infrastructure that will win the traders and users’ support. Interestingly, the COVID-19 imposed market crash has put abundant pressure on exchanges to find a solution to burning infrastructure issues. Undoubtedly, Darwinian evolutionary theory, “Survival of the fittest” stands true in the crypto sphere too. Let us wait and watch how, when and which exchanges will adapt to the “sine qua non”.

You can also read Cryptocurrency Liquidity: Why is it Important for Exchanges?

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