
A letter from Coinbase - artur_makly
just got this:
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artur_makly
Coinbase We at Coinbase couldn’t be more excited by the explosion of interest
in digital currencies. The last few weeks has seen an unprecedented increase
in the price of digital currencies. More people are engaging with our platform
than ever and that bodes well for the future of the digital currency. At the
same time, it does create extreme volatility and stress on our systems. We
take this very seriously and wanted to share some important thoughts.

We’re continuing to invest heavily to scale our platform

Over the course of this year we have invested significant resources to
increase trading capacity on our platform and maintain availability of our
service. We have increased the size of our support team by 640% and launched
phone support in September. We have also invested heavily in our
infrastructure and have increased the number of transactions we are processing
during peak hours by over 40x.

There may be downtime which can impact your ability to trade

Despite the sizable and ongoing increases in our technical infrastructure and
engineering staff, we wanted to remind customers that access to Coinbase
services may become degraded or unavailable during times of significant
volatility or volume. This could result in the inability to buy or sell for
periods of time. Despite ongoing increases in our support capacity, our
customer support response times may be delayed, especially for requests that
do not involve immediate risks to customer account security. You can read more
in our Coinbase User Agreement.

Be an educated investor

We also wanted to remind customers of some of the risks associated with
trading digital currency. Digital currencies are volatile and the prices can
go up and down. Due to the rapidly changing price of digital currencies, some
customers may not have sell limits that are sufficient relative to the value
of total digital currency they are storing on Coinbase. Sell limits are one of
the many measures Coinbase takes to protect client accounts and assets.

As a proactive measure, we encourage customers to check the following items on
their accounts:

Ensure your email address is properly receiving all communications and
notifications from Coinbase. To learn more about ensuring email delivery,
please refer to this support article.

Ensure your two-factor authentication is updated and functional. If you have
recently switched mobile devices, your two-factor authentication needs to be
properly migrated to the new device. In addition, please migrate from SMS two
factor to Google Authenticator to enhance the security on your account, if you
have not already done so. To learn more about two-factor authentication,
please refer to this FAQ.

Familiarize yourself with your buy and sell limits. They can be found here.

Complete any pending identity verifications. During times of significant
volatility, ID verification may become degraded or unavailable. To learn more
about identity verification on Coinbase, please refer to this FAQ.

Expect payments to take the maximum number of days indicated when making a
deposit or withdrawal. Stay up to date

We will continue to update customers for our website, our status page, in our
apps, via email, on our blog and on Twitter.

We will keep you informed

We are committed to safety, security and transparency. We are working
tirelessly to provide the best service and support but we can’t promise
perfection during the periods of extraordinary demand. We will continue to do
our best to keep our customers informed.

Thank you,

The Coinbase Team

