Binance temporarily blocks Bitcoin withdrawals

With a tweet, Binance announced on 13 June that it was blocking withdrawals in Bitcoin for 3 hours due to technical problems that were immediately corrected.

Problems for Binance: Bitcoin withdrawals blocked

Due to some maintenance work on the system’s hardware, technical problems arose, resulting in the blocking of BTC transactions. 

Binance users had their operations blocked for a period of three hours, and in a tweet the exchange advised using other operators for that short time. 

“Post mortem of our temporary BTC network withdrawal suspension.

Temporary pause duration ~ 3 hours.

Impact: Btc network withdrawals only.

Users could still withdraw Bitcoin on other networks without delay (ERC20 & BEP20).

Deposits unaffected”.

Users faced with the impasse were not the only ones to notice the problem, and the voice of the competition was not long in coming either. 

In a very harsh tweet, Ray Youssef, CEO of platform Paxful, criticized the episode, essentially blaming Binance for lacking professionalism. 

“While exchanges like Binance have stopped all bitcoin withdrawals, Paxful remains open. P2P is based on the honest principles of sound money, just like p2p e-money to Bitcoin. 

Food for the mind. 

Why did Binance leave all shitcoin exchanges open?”

The criticism is echoed just below by a tweet from the Crypto Journal that contrasts centralized finance with P2P, insinuating doubt that those using CeFi services are rowing to counter BTC withdrawals.

Almost immediate resolution by the exchange 

However, the technical problem with the exchange platform was also the perfect opportunity to fix all the other bugs in the system to make the exchange run more smoothly and on time. 

In order to address the problem and prevent it from happening again, Binance said it changed the system:

“Taking successful UTXOs only from consolidation transactions or successful withdrawal transactions”.

Binance went on to explain:

“These pending consolidation transactions had a low gas fee, which resulted in subsequent withdrawal transactions indicating the pending consolidation UTXO would freeze and could not be processed correctly”.

In short, every cloud has a silver lining. A three-hour stoppage certainly doesn’t cast a doubt on liquidity, since during this time no action could have been taken on any loans, and it has actively contributed to the resolution of technical problems, so as to achieve a more secure and functional system aimed at the safety and quality of the service offered to the user.