Binance halts Bitcoin withdrawals twice in the last eight hours

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, temporarily halted Bitcoin withdrawals for the second time in eight hours due to a high volume of pending transactions.

“We have temporarily closed #BTC withdrawals due to the high volume of pending transactions,” Binance said in a tweet on Monday.

“Our team is currently working on a solution and will reopen $BTC withdrawals as soon as possible. Rest assured, the funds are SAFU.”

In a follow-up tweet at 7.49am UAE time on Monday, Binance said Bitcoin withdrawals had resumed.

“Pending transactions are processed by replacing them with higher transaction fees. We will post another update once all these pending transactions have been processed, it says.

On Sunday, Binance shut down Bitcoin withdrawals for about two hours because the network was experiencing congestion issues.

“Our team is currently working on a solution until the network is stabilized and will reopen $BTC withdrawals as soon as possible,” the company said at the time.

“Be safe, funds are SAFU.”

SAFU refers to Binance’s Secure Asset Fund for Users, an emergency fund the platform created in July 2018 to protect users’ investments.

While the fund fluctuates based on the market, it is valued at around $1 billion, according to the Binance website.

The term also means “safe” in the cryptocurrency world.

Bitcoin was down 2.6 percent at $28,143.74 at 09:15 UAE time.

Last month, Bitcoin climbed above the key $30,000 barrier for the first time since June 2022, but is still down more than 50 percent from a record high of more than $68,000 in November 2021.

It is not the first time that Binance has temporarily stopped Bitcoin withdrawals. Last June, Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhou tweeted that the platform had temporarily “paused Bitcoin withdrawals due to a stuck transaction causing a backlog.”

It has been a turbulent 12 months for the global cryptocurrency sector, which is only now emerging from a “crypto winter” following the collapse of major platforms such as Celsius, Three Arrows Capital and Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, which filed for bankruptcy in the US on November 11 .

See: What Happened to the Bitcoin Price?

The collapse of FTX, once valued at $32 billion, is the highest-profile cryptocurrency exchange failure to date, after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform and rival exchange Binance exited a bailout, Reuters reported at the time.

Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas on December 12 after US federal prosecutors charged him with eight criminal counts – including conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering – for allegedly misappropriating billions of dollars in customer funds before the collapse of $9 billion to FTX and Alameda Research.

FTX co-founders Gary Wang and Nishad Singh, and former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, have pleaded guilty to fraud and are cooperating with authorities.

Updated: 8 May 2023 at 05.50