Users of the Coinbase were enraged after they found themselves having to cancel their transactions or having to endure a never seen before waiting time for their transactions to be completed.
Many fans lashed out their frustrations on their social media, with one saying that the exchange had many years to fix these problems,but these issues still remained unresolved.
Coinbase's favoritism for Ethereum over other exchanges
Many have also blamed the outage as a result of coinbase's favoritism of Ethereum over Solana platform; and the outage was a direct result of Coinbase not providing inadequate support to the exchange. One of the fans wrote
"Coinbase says the future of Crypot is on-chain, but they clearly believe on-chain=EVM."
And it seems that it wasn't just fans who are voicing such sentiments. Mert Mumtax, CEO of the Solana-developer Helius also concurred that the outage was not the fault of the Solana network and the root of the issue might lie with how the exchange is handling the different blockchains.
"I think they just can't keep up.. but don't consider how different all those chains were."
Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong, seems to also indirectly admit that his platform has provided insufficient support to Solana and promising fans that it will continue to provide greater support in the future.
"It's clear we need to step up our game on Solana, scale our infrastructure and provide native support for common use cases like DEX/memecoin trading."
Armstrong also promised to give Solana the same top-level support as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Base, though he didn't go into specifics.
Brian Armstrong apologizing just because he was caught?
Shortly after the outage, Armstrong came forward to apologise for the outage in a statement on his X. In his statement, he explained that the outage was caused by the huge influx of activity in Solana triggered by the popularity of the new memecoin linked to Donald Trump, which led to transactional volume that was 10 times higher than usual.
The memecoin launch also caused a separate congestion issues that overwhelmed application on the Solana network on Jan 20 due to high traffic. However, the network itself did not experience an outage.
In his post, Armstrong also assured users that the backlog had been sorted and that transactions should go through faster. He said "We have the Solana backlog triaged, and transactions should generate quickly again. If your transaction get canceled, you can retry it now-apologies for the trouble.
Armstrong also described the increase in activity as a positive sign for Solana's ecosystem but acknowledged that Coinbase needs to do better. He added, "We need to do a better job serving our customers during periods of high demand."
But this begged the question that why hasn't Armstrong addressed this old issue for such a long time, and only decided to revolve it now that the issue has blown out of proportion. But now that Coinbase is providing greater support to the exchange, this could mean nothing but good news for Solana.