This article was originally published on forbes.com

For an asset as volatile as bitcoin, it sure is predictable. A combination of perfectly predictable supply and highly liquid market means that changes in demand are apt to cause sudden price movements. There is no other asset with these qualities.

In recent weeks, billions of dollars have been invested in bitcoin ETFs offered by traditional heavyweights like Blackrock and Fidelity. In the past 24 hours, 10,000 bitcoins have flowed in to ETFs, while only 900 new bitcoins were mined. An impending demand crunch was obvious to all.

Then there’s the halving – an event that is built into the bitcoin protocol itself. Like clockwork, every four years, the number of bitcoins that are introduced into circulation is cut in half.

For weeks, we have seen bitcoin’s price rise precipitously. Take that historical data and combine it with trends in ETF inflows and the impending halving, and it’s pretty obvious that bitcoin’s price might continue its meteoric rise.

You would think that decision makers at Coinbase, one of the largest bitcoin exchanges in the world, would take every possible measure to ensure service would be uninterrupted in the case of a sudden price run up.

You’d be wrong.

On a day when it looked as if bitcoin might finally surpass its all time high in dollar terms, Coinbase not only fumbled the ball and stopped trading, it accidentally zeroed-out customer balances, making it look like their money had disappeared.

Coinbase is a trusted, U.S.-based company that has made bitcoin accessible and safe to more customers than almost anyone. How could this happen?

One possibility is that the Coinbase team became too focused on complex, ephemeral “crypto” technologies like NFTs and DeFi. If fewer engineering resources had been focused on these casino-like experiences, and more had been working to build out bitcoin infrastructure, today could have been a historical day for bitcoin adoption. Instead, many end users who do not yet have strong conviction about bitcoin’s potential may have learned the wrong lesson – crypto is not ready for prime time.

For example, in the fall of 2023, Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, announced that the company would soon support lightning payments. This would dramatically improve Coinbase users’ ability to use bitcoin as a medium of exchange, allowing more people to adopt and use the most advanced money technology ever invented. Five months later, lightning support at Coinbase is still missing.

Today’s failure – let’s call it what it was – is a reminder to technology developers and executives that staying on mission is critically important. Although corporate dysfunction is not as deadly for customers of finance and crypto as it is in the airline industry, it still deeply affects people’s lives. Let’s hope Coinbase learns from this experience and grows past it. After all, it is a great American company built on innovation and grit.