Yesterday Poloniex reopened Steem and SBD transfers. 24 hours later Poloniex disabled Steem and SBD deposits and withdrawals again with a minimum estimated amount of $67,877 in unconfirmed deposits created within the last 18 hours alone. I sent 20 SBD yesterday to see if Poloniex was working and 18 hours later no reference to any deposit in my account. Meanwhile, I made and withdrew a deposit out of Bittrex within 20 minutes cashing out of SBD into LTC which I then cashed to USD in Coinbase.
To calculate how many deposits are not confirmed I visited the Poloniex wallet at https://steemit.com/@poloniex/transfers and made an Excel Spreadsheet totaling all the deposits after mine. The totals are
26,802 Steem from 45 deposits made after mine times $1.78 Steem price equals $46,099.
14,142 SBD from 148 Steem Dollar deposits made after mine times $1.54 Bittrex SBD price equals $21,779.
$67,877 total USD value today of deposits made after mine most of which are likely not available for trading on Poloniex.
You can do your own calculations by finding my transaction and visiting the Poloniex Steemit account at https://steemit.com/@poloniex/transfers. Note that this only counts deposits made after mine meaning the actual number might be much higher if the delay goes back further. Additionally, to save time I deleted many of the smaller transactions for under 5 Steem and under 5 SBD which means the actual numbers are probably higher still. That said, Poloniex might have manually approved a few of the largest individual Steem and SBD transactions faster meaning the real amount could be lower.
Is Poloniex near the breaking point?
With what appears to be thousands of customer complains piling up, incredible lag in the interface, verification requests pending for weeks, and what we have seen recently with the STEEM and SBD deposits being disabled, it appears Poloniex may be heading for at least a temporary crash or extended period of offline maintenance because they are overwhelmed to the point of near inability to function.
As many of us can relate to in our personal lives, getting into a situation where we are so overburdened that we can barely keep up with daily life allows almost any trivial event to break us down completely. How many of the disasters in our lives would have been totally avoided or easy to deal with at the time if we were at full health and able to handle the basics? A straw only breaks the camel's back if it has been ridden hard for a long time beforehand.
Poloniex appears to be near a breakdown which could be a good thing overall if they made some positive changes or could provide a disaster in the markets. While Steem is not even one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies traded on Poloniex, see how much their account is worth.
The Poloniex Steemit account at https://steemit.com/@poloniex/ is worth over $52 million dollars today. Over $438,926,155 in cryptocurrencies were traded on Poloniex within the last 24 hours accounting for about 10% of the tracked volume on all exchanges of $4,478,110,003.
Stories from customers are already all over Steemit about Poloniex deposits and withdrawals not going through for months now. Either Poloniex is going to get things together or a straw is going to come along that will break their back causing a temporary or perhaps permanent disaster.
I personally am very grateful for all of the tens of thousands of dollars of trades I have made using Poloniex and the hundreds of thousands of views on my tutorials on YouTube featuring Poloniex. I even made an online course or two just about Poloniex.
When we love someone, I think we also have a duty to be honest and share the truth we see when it hurts. The truth I see is that cryptocurrency trading has grown so fast that Poloniex is on the verge of collapse under the weight of the massive volume of transactions they are processing and requiring too many manual approvals for deposits and withdrawals instead of automation.
After almost a year of using Poloniex, I trade on Bittrex now and will not go back to Poloniex until I see a huge improvement and them honestly sharing about what they are doing to fix their now massive list of customer complaints and problems.
Thank you for reading this and I hope it has been helpful!
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