• Coinbase experienced delays in Solana transactions recently, prompting strong user reaction
• Coinbase CEO acknowledged the problem and soon confirmed it was addressed
• The exchange is looking to improve, it was added

Coinbase Chief Executive Officer (CEO) recently told his followers on X that the platform’s transaction issues with Solana have been resolved, and that business can resume as usual. He also apologized for the inconvenience, saying the problems were not anticipated.

Backlogs and Missed Opportunities

Earlier this week, Coinbase users took to X to complain about the delays on Solana transactions, with some funds stuck in “pending” status for hours, resulting in millions in lost funds.

Solana has become an important foundation for memecoins, which are this cycle’s key narrative. Coinciding with the inauguration of US President Donald Trump, and the launch of two coins associated with the President – $TRUMP and $Melania, the number of transactions on Coinbase surged, resulting in network congestion that impacted the famed exchange. 

Armstrong responded to the complaints, posting a tweet on January 19, saying the team was “working hard on scaling our Solana infra now”.

“Lots of Solana activity last few days, we were not anticipating this level of surge,” he added.

Three days later, Armstrong came back with an update, saying the backlog had been triaged, and that transactions “should generate quickly again.”

“If your transaction got canceled you can retry it now – apologies for the trouble,” Armstrong added.

Taking Responsibility

Aside from temporarily re-establishing the transaction speed, Armstrong also acknowledged the deeper problem the exchange has with Solana:

“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,” he stressed.

The exchange’s goal is now to provide tier 1 support for Solana, and to be on-par with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Base, in that respect.

“The surge in activity is great for the ecosystem (and these are high quality problems to have), but we need to do a better job serving our customers during periods of high demand,” he concluded.