Binance CEO Urges ‘Unfairly Affected’ Users to Contact the Exchange (UPDATED)
After a week filled with a variety of technical glitches and performance issues on Binance, CEO Changpeng (“CZ”) Zhao has come out with an update to users where he invites affected traders to follow up with the exchange while admitting that more issues may arise in the future. They seemed to have arrived earlier than expected, as the major exchange had to pause their peer-to-peer (P2P) and “most other trading services” today. (Updated at 15:38 UTC: the new first section has been added)
“Funds are SAFU. No need to panic,” the CEO said, tweeting that unscheduled system maintenance is underway. At the time of writing, the services have not been restored.
As the time went on, assessing the situation, the CEO was able to share that the only affected “part” is the market data, as “one of the market data pushers had issues,” while matching engine, futures, balances, “etc.” are all intact. As their team is still working on the unexpected maintenance, CZ couldn’t provide additional information, but stated that it “should be fixed soon.”
Finally, the CEO stated that the exchange will provide users with a specific time for order cancellations before trading resumes, that they will waive everyone’s margin interests for today, and “also run some big campaigns after we deploy the performance fixes.”
People in the comments seemed worried despite CZ’s reassurances, though quite a few also praised Binance’s transparency. Some commented on the frequency of issues on Binance, while others compared the situation to the recent failure of FCoin, and a possibility of a hack has been mentioned too. Furthermore, more commenters are asking in what way, if at all, they’ll be compensated for alleged losses.
No guaranties
In the “Performance Incident Report,” published on Binance’s blog on Tuesday, the CEO admitted that it had been “a tough week” for both his user and engineers, and that the exchange had experienced “a number of performance issues, which negatively impacted the accessibility of our platform.”
According to CZ, the main reason for the problems is that there are “a lot more users” active in the crypto market now, compared to the other times when bitcoin was over USD 10,000 in 2017/2018 and 2019. Although this is a sign of a “strong recovery” for the crypto market, the CEO also recognized that it “puts on significant load” for the exchange’s systems.
“I won’t be able to guarantee all smooth sailing from here,” he further said, while adding “We are bound to run into issues in the future as well, and we are confident we will solve them quickly.”
Interestingly, however, the CEO also hinted that the door might be open for discussions over some kind of a compensation for certain users, saying: “If you feel you were unfairly affected by the issues that recently occurred on Binance.com, please submit a support ticket here in as much detail as possible and the team will review it ASAP.”
Judging from trading volumes reported by Binance, a dip can be seen from February 13 until February 18, with the daily volume decreasing from USD 3.28 billion to USD 2.49 billion.
Trading volume on Binance:
As reported, Binance is not the only crypto firm experiencing difficulties with a higher number of users. In addition, hardware wallet maker Ledger is also struggling to keep up with the rapidly increasing interest in crypto, saying users should expect longer wait times for their support tickets due to “a strong increase of requests at the Ledger Support team.”
