May 7 (Reuters) – Cryptocurrency exchange Binance halted bitcoin withdrawals for several hours on Monday, citing heavy volumes and rising processing fees, before clearing them at higher rates.
Late Sunday and again early Monday, the world’s largest crypto exchange shut down bitcoin withdrawals saying there were too many pending transactions because it didn’t offer so-called miners high enough reward to log trades on the blockchain.
The halt pushed bitcoin lower though its losses were marginal, with the cryptocurrency taking about 1% to $28,162, its lowest in nearly a week.
“Our set fees do not anticipate the recent spike in (bitcoin) network gas fees,” Binance said in a tweet. “We replace pending bitcoin withdrawal transactions with higher fees so that mining pools can capture them.”
Gas fees refer to payments made to crypto miners whose computing power processes transactions on the blockchain.
“If the withdrawal amount is large, the gas fee required to process the transaction can also be large, especially during high network congestion,” Joshua Chu, group chief risk officer at blockchain technology group XBE, Coinlllectibles and Marvion .
“We need more information on what led to the large withdrawals.” After an hour-long halt late Sunday and several hours on Monday, Binance said withdrawals had resumed.
“To prevent a similar recurrence … our fees have been adjusted.” In a separate tweet, Binance denied that there had been large outflows from the platform.
In March, Binance suspended deposits and withdrawals due to technology issues. Twenty-four-hour trading volume on Binance was $6.9 billion according to analytics site CoinMarketCap, more than eight times the next largest venue, Coinbase.
Reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by Christian Schmollinger
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