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It may seem unreal, but the technical error of Coinbase made some Georgian crypto traders a bit rich. It requires huge luck to get a high amount of profit from technical problems, but at the end of Summer 2022, more than 1 000 crypto traders increased their profits by 100 times their holdings.
Below, we will explain what exactly happened to Coinbase, in August.
How Georgian Crypto Traders Become Rich With Coinbase
Saying rich is a bit overrated but still, some Georgian traders, who had a quite high amount of crypto deposits on Coinbase, earned thousands of GEL in several minutes.
Everything was going normal until the morning of 30 August. An unexpected technical problem that could not be solved for several hours automatically changed the currency rate between GEL and USD. More specifically, at this moment 1 USD price was 2.88 GEL. So accordingly, the price of 100 USD was 288 GEL. Because of this technical error, the dot was inserted in the wrong place. It showed that the price of 1 USD was 288 GEL.
During the first hour of the technical mistake, Coinbase did not notice it but some of the crypto traders did. They had an amazing chance to get 100 times higher profits from their GEL deposits. So, Georgian traders massively started selling their holdings and withdrawing money from their accounts. That was the moment that Coinbase realized that something was not going right. They found out that the currency rate had changed but were not able to limit access to the traders’ accounts.
How Coinbase Solved The Problem?
Coinbase immediately connected to banks in Georgia to restrict access to private accounts. Before a bank of the Georgia limited withdrew for their customers, dozens of Georgian traders had already done a cashout.
Coinbase could not solve this technical problem for several days but Georgian banks helped them to prohibit Georgian users to cash out from their accounts. This was the only way for Coinbase to not lose more money because of this unknown issue.
Restrictions on making transactions with Georgian bank cards were very problematic for those who wanted to use their money for other purposes. People who had even a single GEL deposit in Coinbase were not able to use their inserted card for several days. It caused massive personal problems.
Even though it has been a month since this unusual mistake, Coinbase had not made any official announcement about what caused this technical problem and what was their comment. People who withdrew money were not required to return the money. So this is how one single mistake made dozens of Georgians’ traders their luckiest day.
Is This The First Time Coinbase Users Were Faced With Technical Problems?
Technical problems are unpredictable and none of the trading platforms are protected from them but for Coinbase a similar problem happened at the beginning of 2021.
Different from the described fact, in 2021 more than 6 000 accounts of Coinbase users were blocked, worldwide. The reason was massive attacks from hackers. People could not access their accounts and lost quite a large amount of money.
Even though the reputation of Coinbase is not strongly damaged. There are still a lot of people registering their accounts and starting crypto trading.
