Interest in cryptocurrencies has grown so strong in recent weeks that cryptocurrency exchanges are struggling to keep up with consumer demand. Exchanges such as Coinbase, Bitfinex, and Binance announced that they were seeing 100,000+ users per day trying to sign up for their services, with Binance seeing 250,000 users sign up in a single day. Many exchanges, including Binance, had to stop signing up new users due to the unprecedented demand and only just reopened today.
Exchanges have had to add new employees to help build out their infrastructure, improve customer support, and verify new user accounts. Continued high demand will likely require continued system upgrades to ensure that performance will not be degraded and that the customer experience will remain high quality.
Part of the reason that exchanges are struggling is that they are increasingly having to conform to government know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) regulations. As that requires verification that each customer is who he says he is, that takes a tremendous amount of time. In many cases, exchanges started with at most a few dozen employees, beginning operations with a handful of programmers and a minimum of support staff. They just don’t have the manpower right now to be able to perform compliance within what most people would consider a reasonable amount of time.
KYC and AML compliance will require hiring staff who have experience with those regulations, and it will require a massive amount of time to go through and confirm all these new accounts. 100,000 users per day is more than one per second, and 250,000 users per day is almost three per second. Without a significant number of staff on hand to put in the man-hours necessary to perform regulatory compliance, many of those users are going to be left waiting for a long time before their accounts are active and ready to begin trading.
That’s why establishing a Bitcoin IRA or other cryptocurrency IRA investment is so beneficial. The custodians who hold your cryptocurrency assets have well-established compliance programs already in place to make sure that when you’re ready to purchase or sell cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, or Ethereum that you’ll be able to do so without having to wait for an exchange to approve you. Everything will already have been taken care of. So if you’re looking to grow your retirement portfolio with cryptocurrencies, it’s time to look into establishing a Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency IRA.