(Bloomberg) -- Coinbase Global Inc. Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong said the company will need to pump more money into improving its trading infrastructure after users experienced problems buying and selling as the price of Bitcoin began surging at the end of February. 

Armstrong, in a Bloomberg TV interview Tuesday, said the outages were caused by a larger-than-anticipated surge in trading — the company had last year prepared and tested for increases as high as 10 times the normal volume following the approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds. 

“What’s incredible is that as Bitcoin touched and surpassed the previous all-time highs in the span of about an hour we saw more than a 10x surge of traffic come in,” he said. “It exceeded even our models of the amount of interest that could come in in a short period of time.” 

Bitcoin repeatedly set new all-time highs throughout the first two weeks of March, peaking at more than $73,000. The uptick was caused in part by interest in ETFs directly backed by Bitcoin. Such products, including ones from Fidelity and BlackRock Inc., have collected more than $12 billion combined since they were approved in January, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. 

The record trading is positive because it’s a sign of broader adoption of digital assets, Armstrong said. “But that just makes our job even more important and we’ve got to make sure we’re serving our partners and our customers with good infrastructure.” 

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