Though it saw many starts and stops, this week continued the crypto market’s phenomenal upwards trajectory—and caused a few hiccups along the way.
On Monday, a CryptoPunk sold for a whopping $16.03 million worth of ETH at the time of sale, the second-highest price ever fetched by a piece in the blue chip Ethereum NFT collection. Crypto users hailed the occasion as a sign that the long-struggling NFT market may be along for the bull market ride that’s currently sending many cryptocurrencies soaring.
On Tuesday that ride got even crazier when Bitcoin briefly broke past its all-time high price to above $69,000. It was a cathartic moment on Twitter, validating the faith of Bitcoin advocates who’ve remained steadfast in their convictions through several brutal crypto winters.
Some Bitcoin maximalists seized the opportunity to stick it to the haters with little regard for modesty or decorum.
By the week’s end, not only had Bitcoin hit another all-time high—above $70,000—but ETH also eclipsed $4,000, and Solana briefly punched above $150, prompting a flurry of excitement and buzz across the cryptosphere.
Every charting software, notification service, etc just slammed me with so many alters on BTC $70k and ETH $4k that my browser crashed 🤣😅
— Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) (@adamscochran) March 8, 2024
Everyone enjoyed the heat, it seemed, except Coinbase, which experienced numerous back-to-back crashes and failures during the record-breaking week.
Can someone please tell me, did Coinbase go down again?
Some good-naturedly embraced the string of outages, joking that it wasn’t a major price milestone for crypto unless Coinbase was down.
Others, though, were less enthused about their financial services provider glitching repeated key trading events.
It soon became a running joke—or conspiracy theory, depending on the individual—that Coinbase was intentionally throttling its platform to prevent trading at certain moments of market volatility, just as Robinhood shut down trading during the 2021 explosion of interest in GameStop stock.
No evidence has yet surfaced that supports the claim that Coinbase has been intentionally crashing its own platform. The exchange’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, said last week that the outages were due to unprecedented spikes in user traffic.
