Cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase announced on Friday its COVID-19 update. The platform reported that it is continuing to support its employees and customers during the outbreak. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, stated in the update:
“My first priority is the health and safety of our employees. That is why we have mandated that everyone globally who can work from home do so. A lot of credit goes to our internal teams who have built the tooling that allow us to flip the switch during a crisis to work almost 100% remotely.”
Armstrong further explained that he and his team have always considered it critically important to use slower periods in crypto markets to invest in their systems so that they are prepared when volumes or prices spike, like what happened earlier in the month.
“Over the last couple years, we’ve invested heavily in increasing reliability and scalability of our systems. This included increasing the redundancy and throughput of our exchange, expanding the capacity of our core products, and improving our internal processes and responses when things go wrong. This hard work contributed to our stability last week while many platforms, in both crypto and traditional equities, struggled with the increased volume. We set new peak traffic records–50% higher than our previous peak–across a number of our internal systems. This included processing more than $2 billion in volume on our exchange in a single 24-hour period last Thursday and Friday.”
Although there is uncertainty with the markets, Armstrong added that he and his team are now hiring.
“As a cryptocurrency company, we’re in a unique position. Coinbase has never known a time where we’ve operated without volatility. We have managed through 40x growth in a year, and negative 10x growth. We are full steam ahead executing on our 2020 strategy in service of our Vision and Mission and we will continue hiring in this environment.”