14 DAY TRIAL // Mt. Gox, the web's largest Bitcoin exchange, is getting ready for some big changes. The service has been having some difficulties, both with US law and with keeping up with demand. It's tackling those difficulties in a number of ways.
For one, Mt. Gox now runs on the Akamai CDN, meaning that users are served by data centers around the world, near their location, rather than a central location which is prone to DDoS attacks.
This should mean that the site won't go down as easily – or at all – due to attacks, and that the site runs and loads faster.
"Structurally we've moved from being a hosted service to being entirely self-hosted, meaning that we have much more flexibility in what we want to do and have full control of our data center. This is a major step up for Mt. Gox in our evolution," the site explained.
But the service is also working on a completely new trading engine, which should greatly help with performance issues.
The new engine, dubbed Midas, is now being tested with 500,000 transactions per second, but it should be able to handle a lot more. The site is also getting a slight UI makeover, which is rolling out gradually to users.
Mt. Gox is also working on improving its bank operations. Deposits and withdrawals still take more than a week to process, causing problems for both users and the company.
"We are in the process of forming relationships with new partners, banks, and taking other steps – hopefully we will not only be back where we were before we encountered these issues , but much further ahead," Mt. Gox added.
Finally, those waiting for LiteCoin support will have to wait some more as Mt. Gox won't be trading the cryptocurrency until some of the features and solutions to the problems above are implemented.