On Monday the crypto community was rocked: Binance, the leading cryptocurrency exchange, suspended Bitcoin withdrawals, citing network congestion. However, Julio Moreno, CryptoQuant’s research director, revealed after a detailed analysis of the blockchain that Binance was quietly moving its funds. At the same time, Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto’s flagship cryptocurrency, has seen its value drop by more than 4%.
Binance suspected of “clandestine fund transfer”
Monday morning, Binance has suspended Bitcoin withdrawals, repeating the same action as Sunday afternoon. Binance attributed this decision to A large number of unconfirmed transactions, which were not added to the Bitcoin blockchain due to insufficient transaction feescausing congestion.
However, this decision caused panic in the market, especially since Binance is currently facing legal problems.
In addition, according to Julio Moreno, the head of research at CryptoQuant, Binance allegedly moved a considerable amount of money from his portfolios during the suspension of withdrawals. He estimates that Binance would have transferred nearly $4.4 billion of Bitcoin between his various wallets in two batches, 117,000 and 40,000 Bitcoins.
Reacting to this “revelation,” Binance said on Twitter that bitcoins had been moved between its hot and cold wallets due to BTC address adjustments. In addition, it confirmed that it had put transfers as well as withdrawals on hold due to higher gas fees. However, at the time of the outage, the number of pending transactions was estimated to be over 400,000.
At the same time, the value of the queen of cryptos, Bitcoin, dropped by more than 4 percent. This is in addition to the difficulties Binance has faced in the United States, where it has been accused of allowing the Russians to sabotage the sanctions imposed on it.
As a journalist at Coinpri, I’ve been captivated by the world of bitcoin and blockchain since 2020. The decentralized aspect of Bitcoin particularly piqued my interest. Since then, I’ve been working constantly to spread my knowledge, hoping one day to see a world where everyone fully enjoys their financial freedom.
