*
Four hour block on bitcoin withdrawals across Sunday and
Monday
*
Pending transactions cleared with higher fees - Binance
(Recasts with fees detail, updates Bitcoin price, adds fresh
Binance and expert quote, turnover data)
SINGAPORE, May 8 (Reuters) - Cryptocurrency exchange
Binance halted bitcoin withdrawals for several hours on Monday,
citing heavy volumes and a surge in processing fees, before
clearing them at a higher cost.
Late on Sunday and again early on Monday the world's biggest
crypto exchange shut bitcoin withdrawals saying there was a glut
of pending transactions because it hadn't offered so-called
miners a high enough reward to log the trades on the blockchain.
The halt pushed bitcoin lower though its losses
were marginal, with the cryptocurrency last down about 1% to
$28,162, its lowest in nearly a week.
"Our set fees did not anticipate the recent surge in
(bitcoin) network gas fees," Binance said in a tweet. "We're
replacing the pending bictoin withdrawal transactions with a
higher fee so that they get picked up by mining pools."
Gas fees refer to payments made to crypto miners whose
computing power processes transactions on the blockchain.
"If the withdrawal amount is large, the gas fee required to
process the transaction may also be large, especially during
times of high network congestion," Joshua Chu, group chief risk
officer at blockchain technology group XBE,
Coinllectibles and Marvion.
"We need more information as to what has led to the large
withdrawals." After an hour-long stoppage late on Sunday and
several hours on Monday, Binance said withdrawals resumed.
"To prevent a similar recurrence ... our fees have been
adjusted." In a separate tweet Binance denied there had been
large outflows from the platform.
In March, Binance had suspended deposits and withdrawals
citing tech issues. Twenty-four hour trading volume on Binance
was $6.9 billion according to analytics site CoinMarketCap, more
than eight times the next-largest venue, Coinbase.
(Reporting by Rae Wee in Singapore and Akanksha Khushi in
Bengaluru; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman, Jacqueline Wong
& Simon Cameron-Moore)
