May 9, 2023: On Monday, Cryptocurrency exchange Binance halted bitcoin withdrawals for several hours, which cited heavy volumes and a surge in processing fees, which clears them at a higher cost.

On Sunday and again, the biggest crypto exchange in the world shut down bitcoin withdrawals which slayed there was a glut of pending transactions as it hadn’t offered known as miners a high enough reward for logging the trades on the blockchain.

The halt pushed bitcoin lesser though its losses were limited, with the cryptocurrency in the previous down about 1% to $28,162, its decrease in nearly a week.

“Our set fees did not extend the recent surge in (bitcoin) network gas fees,” Binance stated in a tweet. “We’re changing places of the pending Bitcoin withdrawal transactions with an increased fee so they get picked up by mining pools.”

Gas fees are states to payments made to crypto miners whose computing power lines transactions on the blockchain.

“If the withdrawal money is large, the gas fee needed to process the transaction may also be large, especially during high network congestion,” Joshua Chu, chief risk officer at blockchain technology group XBE, Collectables and Marvion.

“We need more information about what has led to the large withdrawals.” After an hour-long stoppage and several hours, Binance stated that withdrawals resumed.

“To prevent a few recurrences, our fees have been adjusted.” In a separate tweet, Binance denied large outflows from the platform.

In March, Binance suspended deposits and withdrawals, citing tech issues. Twenty-four-hour trading volume on Binance was $6.9 billion, according to analytics site CoinMarketCap, over eight times the next-largest venue, Coinbase.