Cryptocurrency exchange Binance suspends trading

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance suspends trading

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Binance has denied that it was hacked after a system upgrade sparked an extensive halt of trading and customer withdrawals of funds at one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrencies exchanges.

The depth of the system issues at the Hong Kong-based exchange first came to light on Thursday at roughly 2:20am GMT. An official announcement told traders that “due to a significant increase in users and trading activity, Binance will need to extend the system upgrade” that began hours earlier.

It said that it expected the work to be completed by 2pm GMT, but that “withdrawals and trading during this period will remain suspended.” However, by 1:07pm GMT, Binance was forced to significantly push back its target for the resumption of trade to 4am GMT on Friday.

Zhao Changpeng, chief executive, said on Twitter that Binance had experienced a “server issue on our replica database cluster, causing some data to be out of sync”, requiring the exchange to “fully resync from master”. He added that “no data is lost”.

“ . . . we have not been hacked. Just working with large data takes time,” Mr Zhao said to a user on Twitter who asked for confirmation that the exchange was not the subject of a cyber attack.

The outage at the trading venue, one of the world’s biggest, comes after Japanese exchange Coincheck sustained a $500m hack late last month. Binance’s woes sparked a mix of criticism, concern and sympathy from users on Twitter.

“This is insane! 24 hours of downtime is completely unacceptable!” tweeted one user.

But another said that: “Technical difficulties/failures happen, especially to the biggest and most reputable exchange out there. It’s life, and we all willingly signed up for this.”

Mr Zhao responded on Twitter to the FT, saying: “We still have lots of room to improve. We are hiring.”

Binance, like other digital currency trading venues, is growing rapidly. Mr Zhao told Bloomberg Television in mid January that the exchange was adding “a couple of million” registered users each week.

Cryptocurrencies have been bouncing back over the past few days from a sharp sell-off. Bitcoin, the most actively traded coin, was up 12.8 per cent on the Bitstamp trading venue at $8,569, having traded as low as $5,920.72 earlier this week. It rose above $19,000 towards the end of 2017.