Binance, the worldâs largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, suspended trading on Wednesday for more than six hours for âsystem maintenance.âÂ
The exchange, which has offices and corporate registrations in Malta, Seychelles, the Cayman Islands and elsewhere, resumed trading around 5:30 p.m. UTC (12:30 p.m. Eastern time), according to a notice on its website.
The exchange had alerted users earlier in the day that it suspended all deposits, withdrawals, spot trading, margin trading, person-to-person trading, lending, redemption and asset transfers from sub-accounts, margin accounts, futures accounts and wallets that hold government-issued or âfiatâ currencies. Futures trading was unaffected, the exchange said.Â
During the Binance outage, rival cryptocurrency exchanges saw big jumps in trading orders, based on data from the website Coin360. According to the site, transaction volumes over the 24 hours through 12:36 p.m. ET jumped more than 50 percent on the Malta-based exchange OKEx and on London-based Bitstamp. Binanceâs 24-hour volume dropped by 31 percent during the period.
Josh Goodbody, Binanceâs London-based director for growth and international business, told CoinDesk in a series of WhatsApp messages that there was an âissue with an engine that pushed data around the system.â
âIt was a simple systems messaging error that we wanted to fix straightaway,â Goodbody said. âMain effect was balances were slow to update.â
Itâs âdefinitely untrueâ that the exchange suffered an internal hack, he said, referring to some posts on social media.Â
Binance CEO Changpeng âCZâ Zhao tweeted âall systems back to normalâ at 12:57 p.m. New York time.
Hours earlier, Zhao tweeted that the exchange would âwaive everyoneâs margin interests for today.â
âLeast we could do,â he wrote. âWill also run some big campaigns after we deploy the performance fixes.âÂ