Binance suspends withdrawals citing ‘increased requests from new users’

Binance, the world’s largest crypto-exchange by volume, has announced that it will be suspending withdrawals temporarily in order to address a large increase in “requests from new unique users.”

In fact, while withdrawals did resume for a few minutes, they were suspended again soon. Binance CEO CZ was quick to take to Twitter to reassure Binance users, however, claiming that “System load issues” were behind the suspension. “Funds are SAFU,” he added.

Binance wasn’t the only crypto-exchange to have issues, however, as U.S-based crypto-exchange Kraken also reported connectivity issues, with clients unable to sign in or register with the platform. The latest update from Kraken, at press time, stated that the platform was working towards resolving the issue.

The crypto-market was subject to larger than normal trading volumes today, with Dogecoin’s trading volumes increasing by over 10,000% and constituting over 15% of the market’s total volume.

It was an eventful day for market-leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin too as it appreciated by over $5,000 in a few hours following Elon Musk’s Twitter bio update. The cryptocurrency was trading at over $37,000, at the time of writing, up by over 16% in the last 24 hours.

Source: Twitter

The increase in requests from ‘new unique users’ presumably refers to an influx of new retail investors. In fact, according to the ranking of Crypto Apps used for Finance in the U.S, retail interest in crypto seems to have spiked drastically over the past few days.

Given the events over the past few days, including Robinhood suspending trading of $GME and DOGE on its platform, popular investor Ray Dalio doing a 180 on his crypto-stance, tech-billionaire Mark Cuban’s NFT sale, and Elon Musk’s Bitcoin updates, mainstream crypto-coverage seems to have drawn in a lot of retail investors.

As one user on Twitter said,

“It’s not a real bull run until exchanges are forced to close their registrations down again.”