Bitcoin (BTC) Exceeds $48,000 As Exchanges Struggle To Cope With Demand

Tesla’s $1.5 billion purchase of Bitcoin (BTC) on Monday blew the leading cryptocurrency price. The FOMO is in full swing, to the point that the big exchanges are struggling to meet up with the demand for bitcoins. 

Bitcoin Price Surges to $48,000

Tesla’s purchase of bitcoins yesterday surprised the entire market as it was unexpected. However, its effect on the market was expected as the price of bitcoin began an upward rise. Within a few hours, Bitcoin had blown past its previous all-time high of $43,000 and began charting new milestones. This culminated in the leading coin hitting a new all-time high of $48,000, according to data from CoinMarketCap. 

This represented a price increase of 25% within 24 hours. To place the rapid rise in context, Bitcoin has never experienced such a daily growth in price in its history. Also, Bitcoin’s market cap is approaching $900 billion. The surge in Bitcoin price has caused a ripple effect in the market, albeit to a lesser extent. Ethereum (ETH) jumped to $1,800, surpassing its all-time high within the last 24 hours while most coins are trading green. 

Exchanges Overwhelmed by demand for Bitcoin

Bitcoin’s price surge proved to be too swift for several cryptocurrency exchanges, which suffered technical difficulties yesterday. In particular, Kraken had to take emergency action by halting registrations on its site during the day. 

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The exchange alluded to the increase in demand for bitcoins. “Registrations are deactivated due to the very high demand . Our engineers are still trying to solve the problem”. However, at the time of writing, Kraken services appear to be operational again. 

However, the platform was not the only one to suffer from technical problems. Leading exchange Binance also suffered connectivity issues. Binance Ceo Changpeng Zhao explained that the volume traded by the business far exceeded their previous record. “The system is now stable, although some users still have a latency of one to two seconds. For comparison, the volume of the system was now 60% higher than our previous all-time high.”

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Coinbase and Gemini users also reported similar issues yesterday. Exchanges will have to develop new technical capabilities to ensure that future spikes in price do not affect users.