Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao speaks at a press conference during Web Summit 2022.
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Cryptocurrency exchange Binance halted bitcoin withdrawals for a few hours on Monday, citing high volumes and spikes in processing fees, before clearing with higher costs.
Late on Sunday and again early on Monday, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange stopped withdrawing bitcoin saying there were a lot of pending transactions because it didn’t make it available to recipients. called miners the reward is high enough to record transactions on the blockchain.
The pause pushed bitcoin lower even though its losses were negligible, with the cryptocurrency eventually falling about 1% to $28,162, its lowest level in almost a week.
“Our charges do not anticipate the recent increase in network gas (bitcoin) fees,” Binance said in a tweet. “We are replacing pending bitcoin withdrawals with a higher fee for them to be picked up by mining pools.”
Gas fees refer to payments made to cryptocurrency miners whose computing power processes transactions on the blockchain.
“If the withdrawal amount is large, the gas fees required to process the transaction can also be large, especially during times of high network congestion,” said Joshua Chu, chief risk officer at blockchain technology group XBE, Coinfectibles and Marvion.
“We need more information on what led to the massive withdrawal.” After an hour-long outage late Sunday and several hours on Monday, Binance said withdrawals have resumed.
“To prevent a similar recurrence… our fees have been adjusted.” In a separate tweet, Binance denied there has been a large amount of money flowing out of the platform.
In March, Binance has ban Deposits and withdrawals cited technology issues. The 24-hour trading volume on Binance is $6.9 billion according to analytics site CoinMarketCap, more than eight times that of the next major exchange, Coinbase.
