Binance Shifts $4.4 Billion in Bitcoin as Crypto Exchange Temporarily Pauses BTC Withdrawals – What's Going On?
Binance has moved a large stash of Bitcoin between its crypto wallets over the weekend as the platform halted BTC withdrawals citing network congestion.
According to an analysis of on-chain data by CryptoQuant’s Head of Research Julio Moreno, Binance moved about $4.4 billion worth of BTC across its digital-asset wallets on Sunday in two tranches of 117,000 and 40,000 coins.
"In reality, these are bitcoin sent to newly created change addresses that belong to Binance," Moreno noted.
Addressing the move, Binance said in an early Monday tweet that Bitcoin was moved “between Binance hot and cold wallets due to the BTC address adjustments.”
A cold wallet is a type of cryptocurrency wallet that securely stores your private crypto keys offline, usually on a physical device.
Compared to hot wallets, cold wallets offer more security benefits because they are less possible to hack and are therefore less vulnerable to loss of digital assets.
Binance also temporarily halted Bitcoin withdrawals twice over the weekend, blaming congestion on the Bitcoin blockchain.
More specifically, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange halted Bitcoin withdrawals for several hours late on Sunday and again early on Monday.
The platform said the issue was due to a glut of pending transactions that were not added to the Bitcoin blockchain because of their low gas fees.
"Our set fees did not anticipate the recent surge in (bitcoin) network gas fees," Binance said in a tweet.
"We're replacing the pending bictoin withdrawal transactions with a higher fee so that they get picked up by mining pools."
Nevertheless, the exchange has recently resumed Bitcoin withdrawals once again.
"To prevent a similar recurrence in the future, our fees have been adjusted. We
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