Bitstamp Announces Operational Changes to Handle Influx of New Users

Various cryptocurrency exchanges have seen their fair shares of issues over the past few months. When it comes to scaling infrastructure, a lot of new challenges have arisen due to an influx of new users. Bitstamp, one of the bigger cryptocurrency exchanges out there, plans to introduce some much-needed upgrades. Not only will the site add more staff, but several operational changes will take place as well.

Bitstamp Wants to Remain Ahead of the Curve

Like most other cryptocurrency exchanges, Bitstamp has seen spectacular growth throughout late 2017 and early 2018. It almost seems as if the whole world only now realizes cryptocurrencies are a real thing. While opinions on this new form of money may still be somewhat divided, it is evident there is genuine interest in buying, selling, and trading Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and other assets. However, companies will need to upgrade their infrastructure to cope with this increasing demand.

So far, that has proven to be a very steep challenge for most exchanges. Kraken is a notorious example of this, as its service has degraded quite severely in the past 12-18 months. With orders not being filled, trades not being executed, and a wide range of error messages being encountered when accessing the platform, scaling is its top priority right now. Although Kraken had planned to introduce some big changes in December 2017, it seems not much has happened yet.

For its part, Bittrex has taken some interesting measures in this regard as well. Due to some instability, the company halted the creation of new deposit addresses for a while. Binance, another popular exchange, even disabled the registration of new user accounts altogether. All of this further confirms that exchanges are dealing with a massive influx of new users they haven’t properly prepared for. To be fair, no one expected the cryptocurrency industry to grow as quickly as it did last year.

Rather than shutting down its service or preventing users from signing up, Bitstamp has taken active steps to counter these problems well in advance. More specifically, the company has hired additional staff members. It is unclear if this was just for customer support purposes, but that seems likely. Additionally, the improvement of the site’s overall infrastructure will require additional manpower over time. Business is picking up for Bitstamp and its competitors; that much is rather evident.  

Moreover, the company announced several undisclosed “operational changes”. For the time being, it remains unclear what these entail exactly, but we can only assume they will ensure that Bitstamp’s services remain operational at all times. Whether or not this platform can be more successful than Coinbase in this regard has yet to be determined. Coinbase has suffered from wire transfer issues, cryptocurrency deposit and withdrawal delays, and lengthy ID verification procedures.

All things considered, it is good to see Bitstamp take a proactive approach to handling these issues before they become problematic. Whether or not Bitstamp’s current countermeasures will be sufficient is very hard to predict. If cryptocurrency’s popularity continues to accelerate, a lot of companies may struggle to cope with demand despite their best intentions.