Binance has resumed it operations, a day after trading was halted for a system upgrade. The Hong Kong based exchange has been quick to refute allegations it was hacked. As a token of appreciation to its customers, the exchange has announced it will cut trading fees by 70% for their support.
News of the outage first filtered in on Wednesday when the company reported experiencing server issues but assured customers of prompt resolution.
Hours later, the problem persisted and the company came announced its planned upgrade was taking longer than expected. CEO and founder
Happy to say that we are still on track for trading to recommence at 4 am UTC 2018/02/09.
Reminder: We will allow a 30-minute window where users can cancel open orders prior to trading being opened.
We will continue to update every two hours until the upgrade is complete.
— Binance (@binance) February 8, 2018
Changpeng Zhao later came out to say a server was out of sync but assured customers their data was not lost. It was later re-synced from a master database, the company said.
Operations resumed Friday 04.00 UTC with traders being allowed a window of 30 minutes to cancel or open trades.
The company maintained communication throughout the period even providing its bitcoin and ethereum addresses to prove they still had balances.
Panicked Customers
For many panicked customers, the situation bore all the hallmarks of a hacking. Customers were unable to make withdrawals during the period. The recent attack of Coincheck in which 500 million NEM tokens were lost starting is a similar manner.
John McAfee, the anti-virus guru and cryptocurrency enthusiast was among those who had joined speculation of a hacking.
Binance has not been hacked. Please do not spread false information. If you want to keep updated on the status of our system upgrade you're welcome to follow @cz_binance or @binance_2017
— Binance (@binance) February 8, 2018
Launched just in 2017, the exchange has seen tremendous growth to become one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. Binance has a market cap of well over $2B according to CoinMarketCap.
The crypto-to-crypto exchange is hugely popular for its diverse coin offerings and the speed with which it processes transactions. Binance is available in many languages and has one of the best interfaces.
Some of the new, lesser known coins appear on Binance before making it to other older exchanges.