Coinbase, the global cryptocurrency industry’s largest brokerage and wallet platform valued at over $1.6 billion, has become the Apple app store’s top app, surpassing YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.
Finance and bitcoin journalist Paul Vigna revealed:
Here are your top 10 apps in Apple's App Store right now:
10 Amazon
9 Bitmoji
8 Google Maps
7 Snapchat
6 Facebook
5 Gmail
4 Instagram
3 Messenger
2 YouTube
1 CoinbaseThat's a little surreal. #bitcoin
— Paul Vigna (
@paulvigna) December 8, 2017
Coinbase Struggling to Address Rapid User Growth
Earlier today, on December 8, the Coinbase team stated that the platform has been experiencing record high traffic, causing delays in logins and other on-site activities.
“We are currently experiencing record high traffic. This is resulting in some customers having slow performance or issues logging into their Coinbase accounts. We are actively working to resolve this as quickly as possible,” the Coinbase team wrote.
As the leading bitcoin brokerage and wallet platform with more than 14 million users, Coinbase has evolved into the go-to platform for newcomers and casual investors in the US. The user base of Coinbase along with other major exchanges often peak amidst strong bitcoin rallies.
Most recently, the bitcoin price surpassed $17,500, achieving a historic all-time high. Subsequently, the Coinbase trading platform experienced an abrupt surge in user activity and user growth.
On its peak days, Coinbase had previously added hundreds of thousands of users within a 24-hour span. On November 2 and November 7 for instance, Coinbase recorded over 100,000 new users, adding more than a million users in the month of November alone, according to data provided by Atlanta Digital Currency Fund partner Alistair Milne.
Future of Coinbase
On August 11, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the company had secured $100 million through its Series D funding round led by IVP. At the time, Armstrong stated that a significant part of the capital and resources obtained in the latest funding round, which increased the market valuation of the company to $1.6 billion, in addressing the rapid user growth of Coinbase and GDAX.
“Coinbase experienced unprecedented growth over the last year, and we have now exchanged over $25 billion USD of digital currency for our customers. We’ll be using this new funding to continue scaling even further. Specifically, we will: Increase the size of our engineering and customer support teams to improve the customer experience. Open a GDAX office in New York City, further investing in our ability to serve institutions and professional traders,” wrote Armstrong.
If Coinbase successfully sustains the exponential growth rate of its user base in the mid to long-term, and the company grows proportional to the rapidly evolving bitcoin market, it will also need to provide customer services that are on par with leading institutions in the finance industry, such as Paypal and Visa.
South Korea’s major exchanges such as Bithumb and Korbit have operated 24/7 live phone lines and walk-in counters over the past 12 months. The direct customer service approach of the two South Korean exchanges led to a spike in demand for bitcoin from the traditional finance industry.
As a leading app on the Apple app store, and the most widely utilized platform within the global cryptocurrency market, the company will continue to implement solutions to address the platform’s scalability issues, to become the most popular platform and application across major industries.