Cryptocurrency Exchanges in Meltdown; CEO Says Nothing to See Here

A number of cryptocurrency exchanges are feeling the pressure today, and the cracks are starting to show. Most notably, Binance appears to be suffering despite its CEO announcing that the exchange is handling the surge in traffic within its stride.

Exchanges Drop Services Amid Market Turmoil

The entire cryptocurrency market capitalization shed more than $50 billion in a matter of hours today. The plunge comes as fears of recession prompted by the coronavirus outbreak continue to mount. As traders rush to dump their positions, exchange platforms are feeling the strain. Reports of downtime at Binance, Bittrex, and other exchanges are starting to come in. Traders in the BeInCrypto Telegram group first reported outages at Binance earlier today. At 11:49 CET, one reports not being able to access either BitMEX or Binance. Others later added the popular Bitcoin derivatives platform to the list of impacted services. James Kelly commented:

“Can’t even put in trades on bitmex rn”.

Perhaps most concerning of all is the story of an “auto-deleveraging” on Binance. At 13:18 CET, a BeInCrypto Trading Community member posted: The same trader later wrote that the decision by Binance to deleverage them meant that they had lost out on substantial profits. Meanwhile, other users of the popular trading venue reported similar issues. Highlighting once again that cryptocurrency stored on exchanges is really the property of the trading venue not the user, Binance appears to have also suspended withdrawals: https://twitter.com/LLLuckyL/status/1238101207673176067

CEO Celebrates Binance’s Handling of Demand Swell

At the same time as traders started to report various outages and other signs that not everything was running as it should at Binance, Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of the trading venue, tweeted about how well the company’s systems had held up:

Just now, @binance handled:

🔸146,500 messages per second (highest so far)
🔸30 GB/s market data push (think 30 Full HD movies of newly generated data every second) from one source.

Some glitches on peripheral systems, but no major issues. Will patch the glitches too. https://t.co/cIR1CHQ3rb

— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) March 12, 2020

Zhao makes no mentions of any auto deleveraging or issues with withdrawals. Similarly, neither Bittrex nor BitMEX report any issues on their exchange status websites.