Coinbase Identifies HBAR Transfer Issue After Delayed Sends…

Coinbase said it is working to restore normal Hedera transfers after some customers saw delays sending and receiving HBAR. The exchange first flagged the disruption at 10:04 p.m. PDT on Aug. 28, noting that HBAR buys and sells remained available and that fiat deposits and withdrawals were operating as usual. Coinbase also told users their funds were safe. The problem affects blockchain transfers rather than trading on the platform, meaning incoming HBAR deposits may take longer than normal to appear and outbound sends to external wallets may also lag.

At 12:01 a.m. PDT on Aug. 29, roughly two hours after the initial notice, Coinbase moved the incident from "Investigating" to "Identified," saying it had located the problem and begun implementing a fix. The exchange did not disclose the technical cause or give an estimated time for full restoration at that point. Coinbase supports Hedera for both trading and custody.

Timing and the Hedera upgrade

The Coinbase notice followed scheduled maintenance on Hedera's mainnet, though neither company has connected the two events publicly. Hedera had scheduled an upgrade to mainnet version 0.76 for 2:00 a.m. UTC on Aug. 29, warning that services could be disrupted during a window expected to last about 40 minutes. At 2:16 a.m. UTC, Hedera said the network had been upgraded to version 0.76.3 and was available while further verification continued. Coinbase's incident report came at approximately 5:04 a.m. UTC, about three hours after the maintenance began.

Hedera's status information showed the mainnet operational, with mirror-node services and APIs also functioning. An IBM-operated node was experiencing a partial outage, while a Dell-operated node was undergoing scheduled maintenance from Aug. 27 through Aug. 31. That leaves open the possibility that the issue sits within Coinbase's own Hedera integration, such as wallet processing, node connectivity, deposit detection or withdrawal broadcasting. Coinbase has not identified the affected component.

Market data put HBAR at roughly $0.088 on Aug. 29, with a market capitalization of about $3.8 billion and approximately 43 billion tokens in circulation.

The HBAR disruption follows several network-specific incidents reported by Coinbase during August, with no evidence they share a common technical cause. On Aug. 14, the exchange reported delayed Sui sends and receives, resolved about an hour later. Ethereum transfers saw separate delays on Aug. 17, Aug. 20 and Aug. 21, with the Aug. 21 incident coinciding with delayed ARBETH receives. A separate issue beginning Aug. 22 affected some USDC payments over Polygon through Coinbase Payments, resolved on Aug. 24, while Base and Ethereum payments kept running.

For now, the incident is best read as an exchange-level HBAR transfer disruption rather than a Hedera network failure. The next meaningful signal will be Coinbase moving the incident to monitoring or resolved status and confirming that delayed deposits and withdrawals are processing normally again.