Cryptocurrency exchange Binance temporarily paused Bitcoin withdrawals on its platform on Sunday, preventing the largest token by market cap from leaving the leading venue by trading volume.
Binance said its decision was based on congestion issues impacting Bitcoin’s network, adding that the exchange was “currently working on a fix” to reopen withdrawals “as soon as possible.”
During the outage, speculation about the cause was rampant on Crypto Twitter. One large Twitter Spaces conversation ran the gamut from Ordinal-focused technical theories to international political conspiracies.
Binance reported an hour later that Bitcoin withdrawals had resumed.
Bitcoin was slightly in the green as of this writing, up less than 1% to around $29,000, according to CoinGecko. Meanwhile, crypto exchange OKX said Bitcoin deposit and withdrawal services were working fine, despite high transaction costs.
As of Sunday afternoon, the total number of unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions in the network’s mempool totaled around 395,000, according to mempool.space. On April 26, that figure was 56,500, according to Blockchain.com.