For How Long Will Binance Hold Withdrawals and Deposits of the Funds?

By Kapil Gauhar

Following the $40 million worth of Bitcoin hack at Binance, users are unable to withdraw or deposit their funds. Everyone wants to know when will Binance allow users to take their funds out of the exchange again.

So, When Will the Withdrawals and Deposits Open Once Again?

Binance has suspended all the withdrawals and deposits as they need to conduct a thorough security review which will “include a large part of the system and data. The current measurement of the exchange is that it will take nearly one week before the withdrawals and deposits will be open again.

What About Trading on Binance?

Trading will remain unaffected during this period, though Binance is warning users,

“Hackers may still control certain user accounts and may use those to influence prices in the meantime. But, we believe with withdrawals disabled, there isn’t much incentive for hackers to influence markets.”

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, in an AMA following the hack, said that their trading might be disabled for small periods amid this week.

“There are a few system upgrades we have to do this week. There may be small periods of time where we have to hold trading for a couple of hours here and there for some of the core system upgrades because we actually do need to make some changes in the system.”

Did Anyone Lose His/Her Bitcoin?

The $40 million worth of Bitcoin is lost in the security breach, though other cryptocurrency exchanges try to prevent the hackers from cashing out their stolen Bitcoins by tracking where the funds are going. However, users will not get affected. Binance will compensate the affected users from the SAFU fund that is mainly created for dealing with such situations.

Security Breach

The hack happened on yesterday around 5 pm UTC. As indicated by the Binance statement, attackers obtained a large number of API keys, 2FA codes and other sorts of information through viruses, phishing and other attacks, which led to 7074 BTC being moved out of the Binane hot wallet in this transaction.

Binance, in a statement, stated –

“The hackers had the patience to wait and execute well-orchestrated actions through multiple seemingly independent accounts at the most opportune time. The transaction is structured in a way that passed our existing security checks. It was unfortunate that we were not able to block this withdrawal before it was executed. Once executed, the withdrawal triggered various alarms in our system. We stopped all withdrawals immediately after that.”