Bitcoin adoption is increasing lately. According to some unconfirmed sources, Coinbase has seen a huge growth in customers throughout June of 2017. The company allegedly added one million users to its already substantial customer base. Unfortunately, the company has not officially confirmed these numbers, making it hard to gauge the current pace of Bitcoin adoption and use.
BITCOIN ADOPTION IS GROWING EVERY SINGLE MONTH
Regardless of whether or not the Coinbase user growth rumors are correct, it is hard to deny global Bitcoin adoption is on the rise. More consumers and retailers are dealing with Bitcoin transactions than ever before. Wider adoption only means positive things for Bitcoin’s future. This momentum is not surprising considering Bitcoin price increase over the last few months.
It will be interesting to see how exchanges will handle this growing amount of users. As we have seen from most platforms so far, an influx of new customers usually causes issues. Poloniex, Kraken, COinbase, and GDAX have all suffered from brief outages these past few months, significantly hurting overall cryptocurrency trading on their platforms. It also appears there have been some DDoS attacks against these platforms during the same period of time.
If Coinbase were to see another million new users on their platform, their service may deteriorate further. Outages are never a positive thing for any exchange, and a million more users will likely bring more problems. All of these users will need to undergo a verification process, which means part of the customer support department will need to work double time to accommodate these requests.
According to the platform’s statistics, Coinbase currently serves 8.4 million users. That is only a fraction of the world’s population, but a large portion of cryptocurrency users. They are now active in 32 countries, a number which will hopefully increase throughout this year and the next few. Plus, their $20bn in trading volume is spectacular. The company has been around for several years now, which puts these numbers in perspective.
Right now, Coinbase only supports Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum. All three currencies are doing extremely well, with the exception of Ethereum. Ethereum is trending more negatively than positively lately, but in the world of cryptocurrency things could change over the course of a few days, if not hours.
Things are looking quite good for Bitcoin and other currencies right now. With the total market cap hovering around $100bn, significant progress has been made in the first half of 2017. Now will be the time to prove whether or not this momentum can be sustained. Coinbase and all of the other exchanges will play an integral role in that process. We can only hope their servers can handle the influx of new users to the cryptocurrency community.
