Bitfinex halts trading over ‘reduced performance’ on platform

Digital currency exchange Bitfinex went down for over five hours on August 12, causing many traders to miss out on opportunities to profit.

We are investigating issues with platform reduced performances and have temporarily halted trading.
We will keep everyone updated on here as we know more.
We apologies for the inconvenience.

— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) August 12, 2020

The digital currency exchange became aware of the “reduced performance” of their platform around 4:30 EST and immediately halted trading. Bitfinex did not make an announcement regarding what the issue was, or say when they expected the platform to be back online. They just re-appeared roughly five hours later notifying their audience via Twitter that “Bitfinex is live once again”

Trading on Bitfinex is once again live!
Thank you for your patience.

— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) August 13, 2020

Why did Bitfinex go down?

Minutes after Bitifnex announced that they were back online, Bitfinex CTO, Paolo Ardoino, said Bitfinex halted trading when they realized that a few of their customers had been affected by a “balance issue,” therefore, the team decided to take the platform offline before the problem was able to affect any more traders.

Although it is safe to say that the platform acted responsibly given the problems that they were faced with, the fact that it went offline for over five hours is unacceptable, especially in the volatile world of digital currency.

How were traders affected?

No investor ever wants to see the exchange that they trade on go down for unexpected maintenance. When the platform goes down, traders often miss out on the opportunity to make revenue.—especially if they are trading digital currencies.

For instance, while Bitfinex was down, BSV increased in value by roughly 2%. Now let’s say you owned $1 million in BSV, a 2% increase would have earned you $20,000 additional dollars. But because Bitfinex was down, traders were not able to collect any profit—or liquidate any losses—on any of their digital currency holdings for five hours. As you see, it’s clear why an exchange going down for an extended period of time is a liability to anyone who has money stored on the platform. 

That being said, you can expect digital currency traders to leave the platform in exodus and find a new exchange to trade on if this sort of downtime continues.