Bitcoin Broke $60,000 as Heavy Traffic Overwhelmed Coinbase

Bitcoin crossed $60,000 on February 28, 2024 and briefly traded above $64,000 for the first time since 2021, while a surge in customer traffic degraded Coinbase and caused some account balances to appear incorrectly as zero.

The combination captured both sides of the market’s rapid revival. Newly available U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded products had widened conventional access to the asset, but one of the largest American crypto platforms struggled when rising prices brought an abrupt increase in activity.

A sharp repricing

The Associated Press recorded bitcoin briefly exceeding $64,000 during the session. CoinMarketCap’s end-of-UTC-day historical snapshot placed bitcoin at $62,504.79, 9.49% higher over the provider’s displayed 24-hour comparison window. The snapshot reported a market capitalization of $1.228 trillion and rolling 24-hour volume of $83.239 billion.

These figures describe an aggregated market snapshot, not a universal closing auction. Bitcoin trades continuously across exchanges, and prices, daily boundaries and reported volumes vary by provider. Market capitalization is also a price-times-circulating-supply calculation; it does not measure the cash invested during the session or the amount that holders could necessarily withdraw at the displayed price.

The move extended the acceleration recorded on February 27, when CoinMarketCap’s comparable snapshot placed bitcoin at $57,085.37. The approximately 9.49% difference between the two snapshots matches the provider’s displayed daily change after rounding, but it should not be interpreted as a return available to every trader.

Coinbase displayed zero balances

Coinbase acknowledged degraded site performance at 9:40 a.m. Pacific time on February 28. Its incident notice said some customers could see zero balances and encounter errors when buying or selling, while stating that customer assets were safe.

The company subsequently reported improvements in trading, login access, sends, receives and payment methods. At 4:13 p.m. Pacific time, Coinbase said its services had been restored, although a very small number of customers could still see inaccurate balances. Its status record marked the incident resolved at 9:24 p.m. Pacific time.

Those updates establish a display and service-availability failure. They do not establish that customers’ assets disappeared, that Coinbase lost custody of funds or that the bitcoin network itself failed. The affected functions belonged to a centralized company’s applications and account systems rather than Bitcoin’s underlying protocol.

Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong attributed the disruption to an unusually large traffic surge. He said the company had modeled and load-tested for approximately ten times normal traffic, but actual demand exceeded that level. That was Coinbase management’s contemporaneous explanation, not an independently audited capacity measurement.

Market access met an infrastructure limit

The January 10 approval of exchange proposals for U.S. spot bitcoin products had created a new route for brokerage customers to obtain price exposure. By February 28, the products formed an important part of the institutional-demand narrative surrounding bitcoin’s advance.

That regulatory change did not guarantee uninterrupted crypto-exchange access. Exchange-traded product shares operated through securities-market infrastructure, while customers attempting to trade or move crypto directly still depended on the capacity and controls of individual platforms. Coinbase’s incident therefore exposed an operational constraint precisely when market demand was most visible.

The timing does not prove that Coinbase’s problems caused any particular bitcoin price movement. The outage and the volatility coincided, but bitcoin traded across numerous venues, while derivatives positioning, liquidations, spot orders and fund-related demand could all affect prices.

What February 28 established

The defensible event-day conclusion is narrow. Bitcoin returned above $60,000 and briefly surpassed $64,000, ending the UTC measurement day near $62,500. Coinbase simultaneously experienced a traffic-related service degradation that produced incorrect balance displays and transaction errors before the company restored service.

The episode demonstrated that renewed institutional and retail interest could move prices quickly and strain centralized infrastructure. It did not establish a lasting price level, prove a single cause for the rally or show that customer assets had been lost.