Binance halts withdrawals on tons of cryptos regularly and has done so for years. This isn't surprising to anyone who trades on binance. Guess it makes for a click-bait-y title though.
It is alarming, especially with these circumstances in the market, but fortunately, withdrawals are fully functional after an hour of maintenance and fixes.
This is typical behavior for binance. I don't love it, but alarming? I'm not sure that typical behavior that they've displayed for years is alarming other than now all withdrawals were paused simultaneously which is new, but seems rather inconsequential since anyone who trades on binance knows they pause withdrawal on coins regularly.
BSC / BEP20 appears not to be impacted by this announcement, which is important. Within the platform only the Binance core chain is impacted as flagged by “congestion / suspended” labels.
> If this happens all the time, I'm genuinely curious: What distinguishes this from fraud?
Fraud is when an exchange runs away with the customers' funds. If you had a legal money printing machine like Coinbase or Binance, would you keep your money press printing cash or would you steal your customers funds and risk prison?
Its up to the user to keep their funds offchain so they never have to guess.
Funds on exchange (by quantity of assets) are at or near an all time low, so users are learning. No sympathy to other users, unless their funds were in transit.
> When paypal/banks put a temporary hold on transactions is that fraud?
A bank halting withdrawals would be shut down. Massive difference between putting a hold on an account and freezing across the board.
And for good reason. From the outside, it’s impossible to determine if they’re having liquidity or operational issues. Let that question fester and you get a run.
Banks halt funds every day, when they close for business at end of day. ATMs are available but can be out of order or out of cash. Binance is open 24/7 and maintenance that requires downtime has to happen at some point
no, except catastrophic situations like bank collapses or when the EU decided to close the banks. It also can happen in various countries around the world.
Then again, binance is an exchange, not a bank, and exchanges do halt transactions. Some companies even freeze people's buy buttons, and go unpunished.
Anti-crypto people grasping for FUD straws anywhere they can as we hit all time highs. Exchange wallets, even at US exchanges like Coinbase and Gemini, regularly have periods of downtime.
