Coinbase to Suspend Futures Trading for Nine Hours
Coinbase will take its Derivatives section offline for about nine hours on October 24 for scheduled maintenance. During the outage, users will be unable to trade futures or perpetual futures on Coinbase Financial Markets, but account access will remain available. The exchange says it will post updates on its X account and derivatives status page.
Coinbase also plans to delist Ampleforth Governance Token (FORTH) on November 23. Withdrawals will remain supported, but FORTH fell about 15% after the announcement, reflecting concerns about reduced liquidity and availability.
The news comes as Coinbase faces access restrictions in Taiwan and Kazakhstan. Taiwan reportedly blocked the exchange over concerns about election-related betting. In Kazakhstan, a court backed restrictions on Coinbase and five other crypto platforms for allegedly operating without authorisation.
Neutral
The expected market impact is neutral overall. Coinbase’s roughly nine-hour maintenance window temporarily removes access to its futures and perpetual futures markets, which could disrupt open-position management or cause some traders to miss opportunities. However, account access remains available, and the outage is scheduled and limited to one exchange’s derivatives service. It is not, by itself, evidence of a broader change in crypto market conditions.
The FORTH delisting is more directly negative for that token: reduced exchange availability can weaken liquidity and contribute to selling pressure, consistent with its reported 15% fall. The impact is likely to be concentrated in FORTH rather than the wider market. Restrictions affecting Coinbase in Taiwan and Kazakhstan add regulatory uncertainty and may weigh on sentiment toward the company in those regions, but the article provides no indication of a market-wide trading disruption.
In the short term, traders may monitor Coinbase’s status updates, liquidity and price spreads, particularly around the maintenance period and FORTH’s delisting. Longer term, the effect on broader crypto prices should remain limited unless the service disruption is extended or regulatory restrictions spread to more major markets. Past exchange outages and token delistings have often triggered volatility in the affected products, while having a smaller effect on the wider market unless accompanied by broader liquidity or regulatory shocks.