Leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance has resumed bitcoin (BTC) withdrawals after temporarily suspending the service for a few hours.
Binance Suspends BTC Withdrawals
Earlier today, the exchange announced that it was temporarily suspending BTC withdrawals due to stuck on-chain transactions causing a backlog.”
The suspension comes after a dramatic market sell-off in the early hours of Monday, which crashed the total crypto market capitalization to a new low of $977 billion from the $1.10 trillion it recorded yesterday.
The bloodbath saw bitcoin slump by more than 10% to levels not seen since the end of 2020. At the time of writing, the leading cryptocurrency was trading at $23,300.
Although the suspension was supposed to last for 30 minutes, according to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), things didn’t go as planned and it took the exchange longer than expected.
CZ later updated users that the suspension would take a few hours after assuring them that their funds were safe.
This is only impacting the Bitcoin network. You can still withdraw Bitcoin on other networks like BEP-20.
Likely this is going to take a bit longer to fix than my initial estimate. More updates soon. Thanks for your patience and understanding????
— CZ ???? Binance (@cz_binance) June 13, 2022
Binance Resumes BTC Withdrawals
Three hours after suspending BTC withdrawals, the exchange announced that users can now request withdrawals through the Bitcoin network while explaining what caused the issue.
“We were repairing several minor hardware failures on wallet consolidation nodes earlier today, which caused the earlier transactions that were pending to be broadcast to the network after the nodes were repaired.
These pending consolidation transactions had a low gas fee, which resulted in the later withdrawal transactions – which were pointing to the pending consolidation UTXO – getting stuck and not able to be processed successfully,” Binance explained in a post-mortem update.
To fix the issue, the exchange said it “had to change the logic to only take successful UTXO from consolidation transactions or successful withdrawal transactions.” The company further noted that the fix will prevent a recurrence of the issue.
