I think it's insane that Coinbase has not figured out how to scale their platform, you have to imagine by now that they will never figure it out.
That said, here's the truth: Liquidity always dries up when prices crash. If you look at a stock that is crashing, bid/ask spreads become very wide, it can be impossible to get a limit fill. Market fills will have big slippage from the quoted price.
It's hard, but you have to sell into strength. You can't wait for the top.
Also, how Coinbase lacks limit orders is beyond me. For a mission focused company they are not very focused.
I think they're likely in deep tech debt. They built their original trading system in Ruby. A trading system in a language as slow is Ruby is a completely insane choice and I have to wonder if it's now hamstringing them. I know they're transitioning to Go, but it seems like they need to poach some wall street people who have built much better systems for stock markets to get the performance issues ironed out.
From what I understand, matching engines don't scale horizontally, so you really need some people who can craft highly performant C, C++, or Rust. The algorithms are pretty interesting, and can process a very high number of transactions on even a single core if implemented tightly. I've watched some videos on exchange architecture (from the likes of Jane Street), and their systems are able to handle the entire stock market on a single machine!
At any rate, I think they'll get it sorted out, they certainly have the profit to throw into engineering. And I must commend them on their security, almost everyone else in the crypo space has been hacked, so they've done something right. I'm sure the IPO is going to blast off on day one, and it's an easy 10xer in five years given the current crypto markets.
That said, here's the truth: Liquidity always dries up when prices crash. If you look at a stock that is crashing, bid/ask spreads become very wide, it can be impossible to get a limit fill. Market fills will have big slippage from the quoted price.
It's hard, but you have to sell into strength. You can't wait for the top.
Also, how Coinbase lacks limit orders is beyond me. For a mission focused company they are not very focused.