Binance halts bitcoin withdrawals twice in half a day amid build-up of unprocessed transactions
- The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange says it did not offer crypto miners high enough fees to process bitcoin transactions
- The service suspension comes as Binance faces growing regulatory scrutiny, including in the US, following a meteoric rise internationally
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, paused bitcoin withdrawals twice within 12 hours, citing a backlog of unprocessed transactions.
“There is a large volume of withdrawal transactions from Binance still pending,” the company wrote in a Twitter post on Monday morning, adding that the issue occurred because it failed to pay crypto miners sufficient fees to process transactions on the blockchain.
“Our set fees did not anticipate the recent surge in [bitcoin] network gas fees,” Binance tweeted. “We’re replacing the pending [bitcoin] withdrawal transactions with a higher fee so that they get picked up by mining pools.”
Binance resumed bitcoin withdrawals around two and a half hours later, and said it had adjusted its fees to prevent similar occurrences in the future.
“This is a learning opportunity for us and we’ll do our best to prevent this from happening again,” the exchange tweeted.
The service suspension came after Binance halted bitcoin withdrawals for about an hour on Sunday evening due to “a congestion issue”. In March, the company also temporarily shut down spot trading, deposits and withdrawals, citing a technical glitch.
Bitcoin was trading above US$27,900 on Monday afternoon, after retreating from a 10-month high of over US$30,500 in mid-April.