Binance Clarifies What Caused Earlier Bitcoin Withdrawal Issues

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance explained what caused the temporary withdrawal issues involving bitcoin on Monday in a series of tweets, saying they stemmed from repairs it was doing to address small hardware failures.

Binance wrote that it was “repairing several minor hardware failures on wallet consolidation nodes earlier today, which caused the earlier transactions that were pending to be broadcast to the network after the nodes were repaired.”
The company said that “these pending consolidation transactions had a low gas fee, which resulted in the later withdrawal transactions – which were pointing to the pending consolidation UTXO - getting stuck and not able to be processed successfully.” (UTXO refers to unspent transaction output.)
In order to fix these issues, Binance said it had to “change the logic to only take successful UTXO from consolidation transactions or successful withdrawal transactions. This fix will also prevent the same issue from happening again.”
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao initially said the problem was expected to be fixed in 30 minutes, but Binance said it actually took three hours to address. The company emphasized that users could still withdraw bitcoin on other networks, and that deposits were unaffected.
Binance’s explanation may soothe worries after crypto-lending network Celsius announced Sunday night it would pause withdrawals, citing "extreme market conditions."

UPDATE (June 14 00:38 UTC): Added comments from Zhao in fourth bullet point.

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Michael Bellusci

Michael Bellusci is CoinDesk's crypto reporter focused on public companies and digital asset firms.

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