On January 3rd, 2018, a small cryptocurrency exchange/staking pool disappeared. CoinsMarkets was inaccessible to thousands of angry users who were left behind as their access to millions of coins was completely cut off. The website claimed it was due to a massive spike in users, for which they were unprepared to accommodate which caused their servers to become overburdened and crash. This may or may not be true, however, a similar situation was unfolding across most of the exchanges that this author had been following at the time. Most of the exchanges had been seeing a sudden increase in traffic around Christmas time, ostensibly due to folks like you and I heading home for the holidays, and sharing our excitement for this new technology.
Following this crash, the website put a notice on their news section:
"We have few servers issue we are working on fixing them , all should be back to normal soon,"
And then...nothing. For over 2 weeks, no communications, no updates; Nothing. It seemed that they were well and truly gone. Until, Jan 19, when they posted another ("please excuse our incompetence") update. It was a long winded rant about how hard it is to operate with only 1 coder, 1 Admin, and 6 support. This was followed by another 6 day period of absolute silence.
During this time, on twitter, the ECA coin devs stated that all would be functional in time, and that the exchange was working hard towards that goal. Also, during this long delay, allegedly users began contacting the webhost and registrar en masse to inform them that the CoinsMarkets owners were scammers, which allegedly caused them to take the site off line and search for a new host.
2 more updates on the 27th and 30th of January delivered news that they found a new host, and scammers were using phishing URLs similar to the official domain. These were followed by nearly 1 month of silence. Not a word from the site until February 24, when they announced that they would be slowly opening withdrawals for coins, and that when they were FINALLY operational again, they would be distributing the cumulative balance of all coins staked in their wallets.
What was interesting to this author is, during this whole saga, one could check the blockchain explorers for any of the various coins (if you know an address, obviously), and see that NO coins had moved into or out of the wallets during this period. Which offered some hope for them NOT being a scam, but at the same time, the lack of communications started some of the more paranoid minds to thinking that it was a waiting game for the website stringing users along until the majority of users finally lost interest and they could easily take the coins with less uproar.
Ultimately, though, it seems as though perhaps the exchange IS going to be restored. Whether or not Public Confidence will keep it afloat remains to be seen. As for this author, most of what I hold on that exchange were shitcoins, so whatever. All of them were earned through trading and staking, too, so it's not like it's a huge loss. It hurts, yes, but I haven't spent any of my RW Fiat to acquire any of what I lost. Just keep the age-old advice near to your heart: NEVER leave your coins on an exchange. ANY of them. They could disappear at any time.
EDIT: It appears HIGHLY unlikely that CoinsMarkets ever comes back. It would seem that the ECA devs and community put enough pressure onto whoever they are to make them open up withdrawals of ECA, but none of the other coins are working. Allegedly, the ECA team helped them get the wallet working, maybe they will be helping with the rest, but color me skeptical. I'm going to content myself with the knowledge that I lost a couple hundred $$$, but it was all earned through trading.