Breaking News: Binance Pause Trading but not Hacked! (Updated)

Trading in Binance has been paused for unscheduled maintenance.

To quell speculations of a hack, its CEO, Changpeng Zhao has assured the community that funds on the trading platform are safe.

The error, according to the CEO, was because one of their partners had an issue with data transmission.

Its matching engine is okay and there has been no corruption of any form.

“Unscheduled system maintenance. Trading paused. Working on it. Funds are #SAFU. No need to panic. One of the market data pushers had issues, matching engine was fine, no data loss or corruption (other than market data). Working on it. Should be fixed soon.”

It must be noted that in May 2019, Binance, which is touted as the largest cryptocurrency trading platform by trading volumes, was hacked and $41 million worth of Bitcoin (BTC) stolen.

Preceding the exchange’s admission was an unscheduled or unplanned maintenance.

Often, and this is considering past announcements not only at Binance but at exchanges that have been breached, such unscheduled maintenance patches, are meant to arrest high-level errors. However, the first thing the exchange does is to announce an unscheduled maintenance for damage control.

Such errors are consequential if not addressed as soon as they appear.

A statement from the exchange reads:

“Binance is undergoing temporary system maintenance. Binance has suspended 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. Please note that trading on Binance Futures will continue unaffected during the maintenance period.”

Update

Binance has in the last couple of minutes announced that they have completed the system maintenance. An official post notes that trading will commence on 2020/02/19 5:30 PM (UTC).

From now until the commencement of trading, users will be able to begin cancelling orders, processing deposits, trade on C2C, lending and redemptions, asset transfers and use all other account-related functions.

Withdrawals will be resumed shortly after trading starts.

During the two hour hold, CZ Binance, the CEO of Binance exchange has ensured that there is an adequate update to ensure there is no FUD.

The market which has been bullish today has ignored this short glitch and seems to have gone on in its upward trajectory. This has by far been a sign of a matured market.

Some analysts still expect to see some reaction with the charts once everything goes back to normal.