A record-breaking rally and frantic trading in meme-themed cryptocurrency Shiba Inu disrupted crypto exchange WazirX as its systems could not keep up with the volumes. Listed exclusively on WazirX in India, Shiba Inu is the 11th largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $32 billion.

According to traders on WazirX, though the money was transferred from the bank, the orders could not get executed or once placed, they could not get cancelled. Also, those who traded on Wednesday did not get details of their transactions till Thursday morning.

“We are investigating the delays in the WazirX app and website. The team is working on scaling up the systems and will update as soon as it is fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience,” WazirX told its clients in a communication without giving any reason for the tech disruption.

When contacted, Nischal Shetty, CEO, WazirX said, “In the last 24 hours, WazirX clocked a trading volume of over $566 million. This is the highest volume recorded by any crypto exchange in India ever. We also witnessed an all-time high in terms of sign-ups, active traders and concurrent users. It’s over 40X of what we had seen before.”

Dream run

Shiba Inu has been on a dream run ever since Vitalik Buterin, the founder of the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum, donated around $1 billion (₹7,324 crore) worth of Shiba Inu coins to India’s Covid Crypto Relief Fund. Buterin is a Russian-Canadian programmer and writer, known to be close to Elon Musk.

Shiba Inu was founded in 2020 by an anonymous person going by the Japanese name Ryoshi who put it on the blockchain network to decentralise its operations.

The rally in Shiba Inu can be attributed to the petition on Change.org urging Robinhood, a trading platform, to list the meme-inspired currency. The petition has received more than three lakh signatures.

 

With inputs from

Debangana Ghosh

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