Binance halts Bitcoin withdrawals twice in eight hours

Cryptocurrency platform cites large volume of pending transactions for the pause

This is not the first time that Binance has temporarily halted Bitcoin withdrawals. Getty

Binance, the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, temporarily halted Bitcoin withdrawals for the second time in eight hours due to a large volume of pending transactions.

“We've temporarily closed #BTC withdrawals due to the large volume of pending transactions,” Binance said in a tweet on Monday.

“Our team is currently working on a fix and will reopen $BTC withdrawals as soon as possible. Rest assured, funds are SAFU.”

In a follow-up tweet at 7.49am UAE time on Monday, Binance said Bitcoin withdrawals had resumed.

“Pending transactions are being processed by replacing them with higher transaction fees. We'll post another update once these pending transactions are all processed,” it said.

On Sunday, Binance closed Bitcoin withdrawals for about two hours because its network was experiencing a congestion issue.

“Our team is currently working on a fix until the network is stabilised and will reopen $BTC withdrawals as soon as possible,” the company said at the time.

“Rest assured, funds are SAFU.”

SAFU refers to Binance's Secure Asset Fund for Users, an emergency fund the platform set up in July 2018 to protect users' investments.

While the fund fluctuates based on the market, it is valued at about $1 billion, according to the Binance website.

The term also means “safe” in the cryptocurrency world.

Bitcoin was down 2.6 per cent at $28,143.74 as of 9.15am UAE time.

Last month, Bitcoin climbed above the key $30,000 mark for the first time since June 2022, but is still down more than 50 per cent from its record high of more than $68,000 in November 2021.

It is not the first time that Binance has temporarily halted Bitcoin withdrawals. Last June, Binance founder and chief executive Changpeng Zhou tweeted that the platform had temporarily “paused Bitcoin withdrawals due to a stuck transaction causing a backlog”.

It has been a tumultuous 12 months for the global cryptocurrency sector, which is only now emerging from a “crypto winter” after the collapse of large platforms such as Celsius, Three Arrows Capital and Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX, which filed for bankruptcy in the US on November 11.

Watch: What happened to the Bitcoin price?

The collapse of FTX, once valued at $32 billion, is the highest-profile cryptocurrency exchange failure to date, after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform and rival exchange Binance abandoned a rescue deal, Reuters reported at the time.

Mr Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas on December 12 after federal prosecutors in the US charged him with eight criminal counts — including conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering — for allegedly misusing billions of dollars in customer funds before the $9 billion collapse of FTX and Alameda Research.

FTX co-founders Gary Wang and Nishad Singh, and former Alameda Research chief executive Caroline Ellison have pleaded guilty to fraud and are co-operating with the government.