Trading on the Bitfinex exchange went temporarily offline.
The announcement was made yesterday on Twitter, at 10:24 PM CEST, when Bitfinex wrote:
“We are investigating issues with platform reduced performances and have temporarily halted trading.
We will keep everyone updated on here as we know more.
We apologize for the inconvenience”.
We are investigating issues with platform reduced performances and have temporarily halted trading.
We will keep everyone updated on here as we know more.
We apologies for the inconvenience.— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) August 12, 2020
One hour later, the company announced that the cause of the problem had been identified, and work was already underway to restore trading activities.
At 2:58 AM CEST this morning they then informed users that the intervention was nearing completion and that the platform would be back online shortly in view-only mode, with the possibility of cancelling open orders.
At 3:44 AM CEST, they announced that the trading platform was back online fully operational.
The problem did not affect user funds deposited on the platform’s wallets.
The reason Bitfinex went offline
Later the CTO of the company, Paolo Ardoino, tweeted:
“Few hours ago we noticed that few customers were affected by a balance issue.
We decided, for the safety of all Bitfinex customers, to take down the platform, investigate, fix and restore the service”.
No other information is known, but it is worth remembering that custodial wallets, like those of exchanges, require users to hand over full responsibility for the custody of their funds to the exchange managers.
This is necessary if users want to use those funds to trade on centralized exchanges such as Bitfinex, however, this is by no means a risk-free operation.
For example, if the platform is attacked by hackers who are able to withdraw funds from the exchange’s wallets, there is nothing users can do.
Nevertheless, these things happen rarely, and many exchanges are covered by insurance against theft of funds.
In order to avoid such risks, it is possible to simply store tokens in proprietary, non-custodial wallets and perhaps use decentralized exchanges for trading.
