The cryptocurrency exchange Binance halted Bitcoin withdrawals for several hours on Sunday night and Monday morning, pointing to high volume and processing fees that couldn’t keep up.
Binance said the shutdown was due to a backlog of pending transactions that hadn’t been processed because it hadn’t offered Bitcoin miners a sufficient reward to log the trades on the blockchain.
"Our set fees did not anticipate the recent surge in [Bitcoin] network gas fees," Binance said in a tweet. "We're replacing the pending [Bitcoin] withdrawal transactions with a higher fee so that they get picked up by mining pools."
There is a large volume of withdrawal transactions from Binance still pending as our set fees did not anticipate the recent surge in $BTC network gas fees.
Our team is working to accelerate the confirmation of all pending transactions.
We'll provide updates here.
— Binance (@binance) May 8, 2023
Gas fees are payments made to crypto miners who provide the computing power that processes transactions on the blockchain. High demand for withdrawals requires a lot of processing power, which can necessitate a higher fee.
Binance has since resumed withdrawals at a higher processing fee, the company said.
Bitcoin was down 3% Monday morning to $27,942.64.
Contact Andrew Kessel at andrew.kessel@proactiveinvestors.com
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