Binance’s brief pause of Ethereum withdrawals leaves community perplexed.

[Malam90]

Binance paused ERC-20 withdrawals without offering a credible explanation, letting speculation about its true motives run wild.
inance had a hiccup with its withdrawals for Ether (ETH) and all ERC-20 assets on Friday, with users being unable to access any of their Ethereum-based assets for about one hour. The pause came abruptly, as the exchange's Twitter account notified users that Binance had “temporarily suspended withdrawals of ETH and Ethereum-based tokens in order to address a congestion issue.”

Binance reassured that “funds are SAFU,” but did not provide any further details. About one hour later, withdrawals were apparently restored but the exchange did not attempt to explain what prompted them to pause such a critical piece of its infrastructure.

The somewhat vague motivation of “congestion issues” seems to have indicated that Ethereum’s high gas fees had something to do with the pause. The community showed skepticism at such an explanation, with Red, a moderator in the Harvest Finance community, drawing a connection to the rise of Binance Smart Chain:

“The congestion on ETH is no worse today than it has been for the past weeks, so the timing on Binances part could be considered suspect as they try to wrestle mindshare to the BSC chain from Ethereum.”
Indeed, data shows that Friday was not in any way exceptional in terms of blockchain congestion. A DuneAnalytics dashboard by Alex Kroeger shows that prices were in line with the previous two days. News Source