Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, said that it had temporarily stopped withdrawals of USDC stablecoin, while blockchain data company Nansen said on Tuesday that Binance saw a $2.6bn in withdrawals over the past 24 hours, marking the biggest single day outflow over the 24 hours since June 13, accounting for most funds pulled over the past seven days.
Coinbase Global Inc. has also seen customers withdraw cryptocurrency from the exchange, recording net withdrawals of $546 million in the past week and few inflows in the past 24 hours. Binance had seen a daily net inflow of over $2 billion of Ethereum ERC-20 tokens as recently as November. This has reversed. From Dec. 7 through Dec 13, Binance had net outflows of more than $3.6 billion. In the last 24 hours, Binance saw another withdrawal of $3 billion.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted that, because Binance saw an increase in users withdrawing USDCs Sunday and early Monday, the exchange decided to suspend withdrawals because the bank used to process USDC was in New York and not open.
CEO Changpeng Zhao said in an interview earlier Tuesday that for Binance to swap USDC Coin for two other crypto tokens—Paxos Standard and Binance USD—it needed to be cleared through a New York bank, which was closed at the time.
While Binance is seeing higher volume withdrawals right now, the exchange still holds around $58.9 billion of assets as of this writing, the majority of which are held in Binance’s stablecoin BUSD, Tether, Bitcoin, and Ethereum.