Exchanges are an important cog in the machine that is cryptocurrency. Despite their centralized nature, consumers and speculators rely heavily on these platforms on a daily basis. For Bitfinex users, there was a slight scare on Tuesday when trading was halted for a short while.
Another Issue for Bitfinex
Although cryptocurrency exchanges have seen their fair share of issues throughout the years, it seems some problems will persist. In the case of the Bitfinex trading platform, its popularity is also the root cause for some of the problems the company has had to deal with. Addressing these issues will not be easy by any means.
On Tuesday, the company was forced to suspend all trading activity for a while. As one would expect, this decision sparked a lot of debate and confusion regarding what was going on exactly. In most cases, such developments mean the trading platform in question has run into major issues of some kind.
Thankfully, it seems this particular incident was not linked to a hack or other mishap affecting the company. Instead, its servers were the target of another DDoS attack. Anyone who has kept close tabs on the cryptocurrency industry will know how common DDoS attacks are, especially when it comes to specific exchanges.
Bitfinex is currently under extreme load. We are investigating the issue and will keep you all up to date as we learn more.
— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) June 5, 2018
One of the Bitfinex infrastructure service providers had to deal with a denial of service attack, but it seems the issue was resolved fairly quickly. The attacker’s identity remains unknown at this time, and it’s also unclear why this provider was attacked in the first place. While trading on Bitfinex was suspended, the Bitcoin price fell by slightly over 2%, further confirming the feeble state of this market today.
It is important to note that this DDoS attack did not disrupt Bitfinex accounts or user balances whatsoever. It only impacted the trading operations themselves, which is why the company was forced to suspend all trading for a brief while. Thankfully, it seems all users can now trade on Bitfinex once again without any major problems, although this may not necessarily be the last DDoS attack against a cryptocurrency firm, either directly or indirectly.
It will be interesting to see how Bitfinex and its service providers address issues like these moving forward. Centralized exchanges will always remain a critical problem in this industry until decentralized cryptocurrency trading becomes the new normal. Until then, cryptocurrency trading platforms will need to beef up their DDoS protection, among other things.