Binance Resumes Bitcoin Withdrawals After Twice Suspended
The exchange previously suspended withdrawals twice in less than 12 hours due to congestion on the bitcoin blockchain, weighing on the cryptocurrency market.
The company said that the fee rate for pending transactions has been increased to allow Bitcoin miners to accept transactions. Bitcoin withdrawals were suspended for more than two hours on Monday.
“To prevent similar situations from happening in the future, our fee rates have been adjusted,” Binance said. “We will continue to monitor on-chain activity and adjust accordingly as necessary.”
Binance also suspended bitcoin withdrawals for about 90 minutes on Sunday, blaming congestion on the coin’s blockchain. Data from CryptoQuant shows that the platform saw its highest ever net outflow of Bitcoin on May 7: 175,646 coins.
Bitcoin fell as much as 3.1 percent during the session, before regaining some lost ground and was at $28,230 at 12:05 Singapore time. An index of the top 100 cryptocurrencies has seen similar declines.
Binance is by far the largest exchange in the digital asset industry after rival FTX collapsed last year. Over the past 24 hours, Binance has traded more than $6 billion, five times more than the next-largest platform, OKX, according to data from CoinGecko.
Earlier this year, bitcoin developer Casey Rodarmor released a protocol called Ordinals, enabling people to mint non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the network for the first time. The move boosted transactions on the bitcoin blockchain.
Ordinals have led to “a massive increase in network rates and congestion” in bitcoin, said Hayden Hughes, co-founder of social trading platform Alpha Impact.
