Had to take a look at your profile and when I read "Formerly first employee and architect @ Kraken (2011-2015)" I spilled my coffee all over the place.

This Kraken which was barely usable during the hype?

Was the "Your transaction might have not succeed, please reload" message designed by you?

Dear snarky anonymous coward, if you read carefully you would realise that no, that all happened after I left (2015). Bonus reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18140251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18140482

So your implying that kraken was a great system when you where there and only became a clusterfuck after you left? AFAIK they didn’t decide to exchange a perfectly working and scalable framework for one that was incapable of handling basic functionality for a larger user base during 2016, though I might be wrong. Feel free to enlighten me.

No idea what went on after I left. Just saw the media. I am sure if it had anything to do with me I would have been contacted.

To fix all the technical debt you (rightfully) incurred by focusing more on shipping than future-proofing.

Maybe for a SaaS product I could see some cleanup. But this doesn't sound like a responsible strategy in the fintech space. In any event, if you had 20 engineers already, surely they could simply fix their stuff or you could replace them with better staff who could. How much code does it take to implement a matching algorithm with some asset silos, an app, and a web interface or two? Not 20 engineers worth. This smells like VC tap-money gone riot.

You'd be amazed. The first startup I worked at could barely maintain a CRUD web application with 15 experienced devs.

A large class of features are necessary for scaling: those that automate something that previously required a support call. Handling all the KYC verification for every state and country, for example, takes a lot of engineering.

My impression was most businesses in the space outsource this to specialist providers for legal reasons before and above internal process scaling reasons.

Fraud prevention, compliance, and security are the actual hard parts of running a cryptocurrency exchange. Doing these things well has largely determined the winners and losers in the space. I don't know of any major cryptocurrency exchange that outsources them.

So about a year before the crazy growth I interviewed there. Their platform at the time was on heroku and all the services were managed services.

So ya they had a ton of tech debt to deal with to handle hyper growth.

At the height of the boom last year, Coinbase was signing up 50,000 new customers every day. Scaling would be a problem for any web app at that level of growth.

Why? What is a signup? A couple of simple database writes (100k/day = non-issue for one server) and a bit of static content delivery (offload to CDN so zero impact), maybe an email (can use third party) or an SMS (again), accepting a file upload (mostly bandwidth issue, use cloud). It's not rocket science.