Binance suspended Bitcoin withdrawals for several hours on Monday, claiming high volumes and an increase in processing costs, before clearing them at a higher rate.
The world’s largest crypto exchange stopped down bitcoin withdrawals late Sunday and again early Monday, citing a surplus of outstanding transactions as a result of not paying so-called miners a high enough payment to track the deals on the blockchain.
The pause sent bitcoin lower, if little, with the cryptocurrency last down roughly 1% to $28,162, its lowest in nearly a week.
“Our set fees did not anticipate the recent surge in (bitcoin) network gas fees,” Binance said in a tweet.
“We’re replacing the pending bitcoin withdrawal transactions with a higher fee so that they get picked up by mining pools.”
Gas fees are payments made to cryptocurrency miners whose computational power is used to process transactions on the blockchain.
Binance banned deposits and withdrawals in March, citing technical difficulties. According to analytics site CoinMarketCap, the 24-hour trading volume on Binance was $6.9 billion, more than eight times the next-largest venue, Coinbr.