Binance Outage Possibly Related to Tether Chain Swap

Binance is experiencing an outage today as traders struggle to process orders. Changpeng Zhao (CZ), Binance’s CEO, has since said it is due to a ‘system failure’ and funds are still safe. However, what’s curious is that Tether announced that its planned chain swap with a third party was delayed right when the news of Binance’s outage first broke. Tether claims it will be delaying the swap at the request of the third party they are working with — which seems to be in line with Binance’s recent actions.

Update: the chain swap will be subject to a delay upon request of the 3rd party. https://t.co/rp08lkS4ao

— Tether (@Tether_to) March 4, 2020

Others were quick to pick up on this coincidence, as well.

Does the third party's name start with B end with E and have INANC in the middle?

— Hsaka (@HsakaTrades) March 4, 2020

Tether plans to convert some 200M USDT from its own OMNI blockchain over to Ethereum. The total supply will remain unchanged. Such swaps were previously done with the help of Binance, so believing it to be the third party in question is not a stretch of the imagination. In December, as BeInCrypto previously reported, 200M USDT from the OMNI blockchain to Ethereum was done with the help of Binance.  It’s unclear whether some malfunction relating to the chain swap caused the system failure on Binance, however. It could be that the failure preceded the swap and this was mere coincidence. Binance has been struggling with outages ever since users reported incorrect balances and unprocessed trades last month.