Major cryptocurrency exchange Binance halted trading on its platform to resolve an unexpected technical issue with its infrastructure.
An announcement published by Binance on Feb. 19 notes that, due to unscheduled system maintenance, the exchange suspended most of its activities. More precisely, as of press time, it is not possible to perform “deposits, withdrawals, spot trading, margin trading, P2P trading, lending, redemption, as well as asset transfers from sub-accounts, margin accounts, futures accounts, and fiat wallets” on the platform.
In a statement shared with Cointelegraph, Binance reassured its users that partner exchanges such as Binance.US were unaffected and that trading activity will resume shortly.
No funds were lost
Binance co-founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao explained in a tweet sent earlier today that one of the market data pushers experienced an issue, but the matching engine did not, so no funds or data were lost. He also said in a separate message that futures trading is continuing normally since it employs a separate matching engine.
In an attempt to compensate users for the market disruption, Zhao also promised to waive the trader margin interests for today. In his latest update as of press time, he said that the issues are nearly resolved and that users will have 30 minutes to cancel their orders before normal trading resumes.
Just the latest problem experience by Binance users
This is just the latest issue experienced by Binance users this month. On Feb. 17, Binance released a separate report on performance problems. In the report, the firm admits that it did not anticipate the volume of users who recently started using its platform. The paper reads:
“Last week was a tough one. [...] We had a number of performance issues, which negatively impacted the accessibility of our platform.”
Per the report, Binance’s trading platform was unable to manage all users and keep market data, orders and balances up to date. The firm promises to solve these issues soon, and encourages users who were damaged by the performance issues to contact the exchange’s support.
The fear of unscheduled exchange maintenance
Some Twitter users expressed concern and fear that Binance may have fallen victim to a hack, but there is no evidence suggesting that this is the case. In fact, the performance issues recently reported by the exchange and its users add further credibility to the cause being a simple technical problem.