As Bitcoin rises above $41K, can Coinbase keep up with the rally?

Coinbase is under the microscope as the Bitcoin price surged past $41,000 following a minor retrace after topping $40,000 on Thursday.

The United States-based crypto exchange is known for experiencing serious connectivity issues during periods of peak trading activity. Indeed, these disruptions have reportedly prevented traders from taking advantage of price gains and dips, robbing them of profit-taking and reentry opportunities.

As Cointelegraph recently reported, Coinbase has acquired Routefire, a platform for enhanced trade execution as part of an effort to better handle periods of peak crypto trading activity.

As of press time, Coinbase is yet to report any connectivity issues across its exchange platforms. According to its status page, the company identified and fixed the root cause of the service disruption experienced on Thursday.

Coinbase is not the only major exchange to suffer issues during Bitcoin price rallies. Binance also routinely goes offline when BTC prints major price gains. Commenting on the problem back in December 2020, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao remarked that 5% Bitcoin price gains are often accompanied by a 30 times increase in trading volumes which could cause significant latency issues on the platform.

Bitcoin's surge above the $41,000 price mark puts BTC in the top-10 global asset class with a market capitalization exceeding tech conglomerates like Facebook and Tencent. Above Tesla, Bitcoin will need to exceed the $1 trillion market capitalization milestone to overtake the likes of Google and Amazon.

At the current market price, Bitcoin is up more than 40% year-to-date and has increased almost four-fold since this same time in 2020.