However, on the wave of the December “bitcoin-mania”, users discontent grew with the network’s busyness: exchanges, including Coinbase and GDAX, were not able to cope with record demand and went offline, fees and transaction confirmation time were increasing. In mid-January, customers sent Coinbase CEO Bryan Armstrong a petition that collected more than 12,000 signatures, calling for support for SegWit as a priority for 2018. Jameson Lopp, the leading engineer of the BitGo crypto wallet, called for the abandonment of Coinbase services: “It is not a discovery that a significant cause of overloads in the Bitcoin network is caused by such popular services as Blockchain.info, Coinbase and Gemini, which inefficiently use block space. If you do not want to contribute to this, do not use it. ” Armstrong again responded to the charge, saying that “Coinbase is working on packetizing transactions, SegWit and a number of other strategies to eliminate stagnation in the network.”