Tim Swanson, the Director of research at Post Oak Labs recently resorted to Twitter to express his concern regarding the falling web traffic of Coinbase. He shared a screenshot from SimilarWeb that shows a drop in traffic and asked how accurate this data could be.
The screenshot from SimilarWeb reveals a continuous drop in the web traffic of Coinbase over the past six months. The website experienced a fall in traffic as high as 30% in Germany, 22% in France and 18% in the UK. As per SimilarWeb, Coinbase gets 50% of its traffic from the United States, where it experienced a relatively smaller drop of 7%.
His tweet has received varied responses from crypto enthusiasts as well as industry experts. To Swanson’s tweet, SimilarWeb responded by pointing out that the Coinbase website had experienced a “major spike” in the months of December and January. So, the drop after that possibly marks a “return to normal levels.”
The comment that’s gaining the most traction is that of the Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. “Is anyone surprised? We’re at the tail end of a crypto bubble,” he commented referring to Swanson’s tweet. Among crypto enthusiasts there seems to a divide regarding the current bulls being a bubble or not.
This is not the first time that Buterin resorted to Twitter to express his opinion on the wild fluctuations in the market. Last month he remarked, “there’s no ‘cure’ for bubbles except to let them run their course and pop, unfortunately.”
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase has not replied to Swanson’s post yet; however, he has previously expressed his views about the ups and downs in the crypto market. “The crypto industry is like no other I’ve seen – lots of up and down cycles (reaching a new plateau each time). There have been 3 or 4 of these now. It can be scary the first time you see it, but to us who have been in the industry for many years, it feels like old news,” he shared.
He also remarked that people are usually “irrationally exuberant” or “irrationally pessimistic” regarding crypto hype and despair. “Reality is always somewhere in the middle, more correlated with real usage (transactions per day) than the price,” Armstrong added.
