Coinbase stock hits multi-month highs despite platform glitch as trading volume surges

Coinbase’s stock hit multi-month highs yesterday despite heavy web traffic causing a glitch on the crypto exchange as trading volume surged.

Coinbase shares gained just 1% on Wednesday, but that was enough to close above the $200 mark for the first time since January 2022, according to TradingView. COIN traded for $200.80 by market close on Wednesday, up 58% over the past month. However, the stock remains more than 40% down from an all-time high of $342.98 set during November 2021’s crypto bull-market peak.

COIN/USD price chart. Image: TradingView .

Coinbase is currently valued at $37.4 billion, according to The Block’s data dashboard .

Daily trading volume on Coinbase soars

Trading volume on the exchange soared to more than $8.6 billion over the past 24 hours — nearly double the volume generated in the prior 24-hour period and substantially higher than the $200 million to $3 billion daily trading volume range over the last year, according to CoinGecko data .

Coinbase daily trading volume. Image: CoinGecko .

To put that into perspective, yesterday’s trading represents the equivalent of 5% of the total volume in Q4 2023 and 10% of the volume in Q3 2023, according to The Block’s data dashboard .

High traffic causes glitch as retail shows signs of a return

Heavy traffic caused Coinbase’s app to glitch and show customer balances as having $0 yesterday amid the surge in trading as the price of bitcoin rose above $60,000 to reach a high of $64,000 on Wednesday. 

"We had modeled a ~10x surge in traffic and load-tested it. This exceeded that number. It's expensive to keep services over-provisioned, but we'll need to keep working on auto-scaling solutions, and killing any remaining bottlenecks. Thank you for bearing with us," Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong explained on X.

Many institutional issuers of spot bitcoin ETFs, such as BlackRock, Ark Invest and Grayscale Investments, tapped Coinbase as their crypto custodian. However, Nate Geraci, president of investment advisor The ETF Store, told The Block that spot bitcoin ETF issuers weren't affected.

The platform’s degraded performance has since been resolved, according to Coinbase’s status page .

“$60k woke people up,” Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan posted on X amid speculation that retail users are returning to the crypto market. “For the first time in this bull market, non-bitcoiners started texting me about the market today.”

As pointed out by The Block’s Research Director Steven Zheng, Coinbase’s app store ranking jumped from 300 to a yearly high of 174 yesterday, appearing to back the claims.

Coinbase app rankings. Source: Coinbase App Rank Bot .

Coinbase has also risen to a yearly high rank of 15 for the finance category on the App Store in the U.S., according to The Block’s data dashboard . Cash App is currently ranked number one.

There has also been a recent uptick in Google search volume for crypto terms, including Coinbase.

Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest offloads more than $17 million in Coinbase shares

Meanwhile, Ark Invest offloaded 86,298 Coinbase shares — worth around $17.3 million — from its Innovation exchange-traded fund, ARKK, on Wednesday as the investment manager continues to rebalance its fund weightings amid the surge in COIN’s price this month.

Yesterday’s offloading follows the 46,531 ($9.3 million) Coinbase shares Ark Invest sold from the same fund on Tuesday and the $7.1 million worth of COIN it offloaded on Monday. Ark also sold $16 million worth of Coinbase stock last week.

Ark’s latest sales come after Coinbase exceeded analysts’ forecasts for Q4 2023, with the crypto exchange announcing revenues of $953.8 million, an increase from $629.1 million in the corresponding quarter of 2022.