Binance withdrawals expected to reopen next week as disgruntled customers prepare exodus

Binance, consistenty the worlds leading cryptocurrency exchange by Tether USDT “trading” volume is set to reopen withdrawals early next week. A week is a long time in crypto though and memories are not as short as some might hope:

• Binance was “hacked” for roughly the same amount of cryptocurrency as they were allegedly “hacked” for a year ago, with no sign of anyone stopping the withdrawal addresses and responsible “thieves”.
• Binance publicly admitted they can collude with just a couple of large mining pools to manipulate, rewrite and completely control Bitcoin.
• Binance still refuse to take any action against criminal money laundering and market manipulation tool Tether, despite it breaking all their listing terms and conditions.
• Binance Coin (BNB) was sacrificed following the scandal, taking a massive nosedive of 15% – 20% in order to prop up big brother Bitcoins reputation despite there supposedly being a #SAFU fund at Binance to cover any losses.
• In the aftermath of all these scandals, with Binance deposit and withdrawals frozen for a week at minimum and with no new money entering the crypto space, an epic Bitcoin market manipulation took place sparking a short term price rise and fake bull run to draw the remainder of the attention away from Bitcoins complete failure.

The public is not stupid though and are completely fed up with the continued manipulation by large entities in this space.

A large number of Binance customers are preparing to completely leave the unregulated exchange once funds can be withdrawn. Myself and everyone I have spoken to in person who has a Binance account is counting down the days till we can pull all our funds off the exchange. The #deleteBinance movement is in full swing.

But most importantly there is a growing clamour for the real legitimate, regulatable and legal cryptocurrencies to join forces and delist themselves from shonky exchanges such as Binance, little sister Bitfinex and friends.

Enough is enough: #delistBinance

Binance Security Incident Update

Binance – 12th May 2019

Dear Binancians,

I would like to share some updates on the security incident. We understand the situation is tough for our community. We strive to maintain the highest degree of transparency; however, please also understand hackers are reading every word we post and watching every AMA we host. Sharing too many security details actually weakens our security response strategy.

Rest assured, our team is making progress. We are taking this opportunity to significantly revamp some of our security measures, procedures, and practices. With the goal of resuming deposits and withdrawals as soon as possible, some of the changes will be done within the window of this week, and many further changes will be added afterwards.

We are making significant changes to the API, 2FA, and withdrawal validation areas, which was an area exploited by hackers during this incident. We are improving our risk management, user behavior analysis, and KYC procedures. We are working on more innovative ways to fight phishing. We also have a number of additional security measures being implemented not directly visible on the front end.

We will be adding hardware device support, such as YubiKey and other devices, very soon. We will run an event and give away 1,000 YubiKeys as soon as that feature is implemented.

Impact-wise, the single BTC transaction of about 7000 BTC is the only transaction in which funds were stolen, and it’s quite simple to verify this on the blockchain. There are many community experts watching every Binance wallet. We are still investigating all other areas of the system to ensure no stone is left unturned. Furthermore, we are working with a dozen or so industry-leading security expert teams to help improve our security as well as track down the hackers.

Many security and blockchain analytics firms are actively helping us track the stolen funds. We are also working closely with many exchanges and other service providers to freeze the stolen funds. It already is sort of an alliance. We have some ideas to contribute more on this front after we get over this incident.

Mentally, the Binance team is not sad or depressed; on the contrary, we are in fighting mode. This event has further united an already tight team. We have received tremendous support from our community and we are humbled by your support. We will continue to fight for all of us, the community, against hackers and people with ill intentions. I believe this incident, while damaging us now, will actually make us far stronger and more secure in the long run.

We will maintain constant communication with our community. I (CZ) am active on Twitter. In fact, some people even say I tweet too much. But my role is a facilitator and communicator.  Honestly, I am not writing code or debugging servers. Given how much I talk, I sometimes say the wrong stuff, dirty words like “reorg”, for which I apologize. It is my strong view that our constant and transparent communication is what sets us apart from the “old way of doing things”, even and especially in tough times.

Tentatively, we are looking to resume withdrawals and deposits early next week. We still have a large number of tasks and tests to do, and we are working around the clock on it.

Once again, we thank you for your unwavering support during these tough times! We will fight on.

– CZ

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