Mt. Gox, Bitcoin’s largest exchange, now runs on Akamai as it prepares new trading engine

There’s good news for users of the virtual currency Bitcoin after Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange on the Web, announced that its service is now running on Akamai, a move that will bring greater stability to the growing platform.

Japan-based Mt. Gox is a service that allows Internet users to trade real-world currency for Bitcoin and vice-versa, but it has been beset with growing pains due to its popularity. The company suspended US dollar trading for two weeks in June and July to improve its service, and has suffered a number of DDoS attacks in the past — it was even forced to halt trading in April following a major Bitcoin price crash.

There are also reports that US authorities are probing Mt. Gox, after it seized Dwolla’s payments to and from the service in May for conducting “unlicensed money transmitting”.

Mt. Gox’s August update explains that the Akamai tie-in will “massively increase our protection” and also make its exchange faster and more reliable for customers.

“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 company says.

It reveals that is also preparing to roll out its new trading engine. Codenamed ‘Midas,’ it is being tested at a speed of 500,000 trades per second, but Mt. Gox says it will be capable of a faster rate when it is released.

The company is working on a whole host of other plans, including a new user experience and support for the Litecoin virtual currency, which has been in process for sometime.

Bank support has been an ongoing issue, and Mt. Gox is edging closer to bringing on new banking partners to ease its payment process. The company is trying to improve the speed at which it can credit accounts; currently it can take as many as 10 days to process a deposit because its bank holds funds before transferring them.

Given that some transactions are rejected by its bank, Mt. Gox says it can no longer take the risk of prematurely crediting its customer accounts. But, that could change with new partners.

Headline image via zcopley/Flickr