After Binance blocked bitcoin withdrawals for many hours on Monday owing to high volumes and processing costs, cryptocurrency and blockchain stocks plummeted.
The halts dropped Bitcoin 2% to $27,900, a one-week low.
Bitfarms Ltd plummeted 5.1%, and Coinbase Inc (COIN.O) sank 3.6%. Riot Platforms (RIOT.O), Marathon Digital (MARA.O), and Hut 8 Mining (HUT.TO) fell 5.3% to 6.6% as bitcoin prices fell.
Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, stopped bitcoin withdrawals an hour late on Sunday and around three hours on Monday. It cited a glut of pending transactions because it hadn’t given miners enough incentive to register the deals on the blockchain.
The business stated their pricing did not foresee a recent rise in bitcoin-network gas costs, which crypto miners use to execute blockchain transactions.
“There were so much traffic congestion and also the gas fees were so high over the weekend… even by historical standards,” Oppenheimer’s Owen Lau told Reuters.
Binance tweeted that it modified pricing to “prevent a similar recurrence”. Tech difficulties halted deposits and withdrawals in March.
