Binance temporarily halts Bitcoin withdrawals due to heavy volumes and rising processing fees
Daniel Levi
Posted On May 8, 2023
Binance temporarily halted Bitcoin withdrawals for several hours, causing shares of cryptocurrency- and blockchain-related companies to fall in premarket trading on Monday. The exchange said the halt was due to heavy volumes and rising processing fees.
The halts caused the price of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency bitcoin to dip by 2% to a one-week low of $27,900.
On Sunday, Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange globally, suspended bitcoin withdrawals for one hour and for approximately three hours on Monday due to an excess of pending transactions. The company explained that it had not provided “miners” with a high enough incentive to record trades on the blockchain.
Binance acknowledged that its current fees did not account for the recent increase in bitcoin-network gas fees, which are payments made to cryptocurrency miners for their computational power that facilitates transactions on the blockchain.
“To prevent a similar recurrence … our fees have been adjusted,” Binance had said.
This is at least the second time Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, has halted withdrawals. In March, Binance suspended deposits and withdrawals on its platform due to technical glitches affecting its spot trading. Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao said at the time the issue was due to a bug on a trailing stop order that affected the company’s matching engine.
Founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao and Yi He, the Cayman Islands-based Binance is the world’s leading blockchain ecosystem and cryptocurrency infrastructure provider with a financial product suite that includes the largest digital asset exchange by volume. It provides a platform for trading various cryptocurrencies. Binance also provides access to exchange digital currency pairs on the market while maintaining security, and liquidity, enabling a safe and efficient deal with anyone, anytime and anywhere.
Update: Binance has once again resumed Bitcoin withdrawals after a second pause after the Bitcoin network suffers from unprecedented congestion.
