Bitfinex Exchange Shuts Down for Few Minutes; Trading and Withdrawal Functions Resume
Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange, Bitfinex, reportedly experienced an outage earlier on Thursday. The system outage caused the trading and withdrawal functionality on the exchange to shut down as well. According to reports, traders could not access their open orders and crypto assets on the platform.
Bitfinex announced the shutdown on its Twitter page and in another post on its blog, in which it also gave a timeline for the restoration of operations. The exchange promised to fix the issue by 10:05 AM UTC, 5 hours before press time. As of press time, trading activities had resumed.
Bitfinex Fixes Technical Issue Within Minutes
The first signs of the technical issue were noticed at about 07:05 AM UTC. At the time, the trading functionality stopped working, but the website was still online and accessible. The whole website would go offline a few minutes later, Bitfinex reported. Traders could not access the withdrawal function during the same period. However, the withdrawal function is now also back online and traders can equally see their open orders at the time of this writing.
Incidents like this are common with centralized crypto exchanges. In some cases, crypto exchanges inform their users beforehand of scheduled maintenance. Binance had carried out maintenance earlier this week, but not without informing users about the deactivation of trading and withdrawal functions.
Bitfinex Almost Loses $23.7 million in Ether As Transaction Fee
Bitfinex was also in the news this week for what is known as ‘a fat finger’ error. While attempting to transfer $100k worth of Tether (USDT) from one of its cold storage wallets to Ethereum-based decentralized exchange Deversifi in an internal transaction, Bitfinex erroneously paid $23.7 million in ETH as a fee for the transaction. However, Deversifi, which was also incubated by Bitfinex in 2017 before launching in 2018, claimed responsibility for the mistake. The transaction should have cost a mere $5, Bitfinex revealed.
As of press time, a portion of the funds worth $23.5 million in Ether had been returned with the rest of the funds given as a reward to the miner who validated the transaction on the network. Deversifi thanked the miner for his cooperation. The DEX had traced the funds to a custodial wallet on Binance belonging to the miner. According to estimates, the reward is to the tune of $140,000 or 50 Ether.
Bitfinex scored a win on Thursday- as reported by several media outlets in light of class action filed against it alongside a second defendant, stablecoin issuer Tether. The main issue raised in the suit is that both defendants allegedly manipulated the price of Bitcoin at one time in 2019. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit comprise a group of traders.
Meanwhile, Bitfinex and Tether have asked the New York Court to dismiss other claims raised in the two-year-long court action. In the same year, Bitfinex was accused of covering up an $850 million loss with USDT stablecoin by New York’s Attorney General, Letitia James.
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