'Atypical' crypto transactions prompt Binance to halt trading

Moneycontrol News

World’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange Binance had suspended its trading services after noticing a series of irregular transactions happening in a very short period of time. Being one of the largest cryptocurrency platforms in the world, crypto enthusiasts were in for a shock. As per the latest update, Binance confirmed that it has resumed trading at 8.00 UTC on July 4 and the service was down due to irregular trades of SYS cryptocurrency.

As per a report by Coindesk, “Odd trading behaviour coupled with a typical block chain activity” was discovered by Syscoin, and they also noticed suspicious issues and subsequently asked to suspend trading cryptocurrency. Syscoin, a distributed network based on a fork of the bitcoin protocol, has not yet given out any details of its investigation. However, it seems like the issue was unusual transactions that happened on Binance’s SYS order books, accounting for nearly 87 percent of the total trading. Syscoin co-founder Sebastien DiMichele said, "My understanding is that yes, Syscoin was sold for 96 BTC per unit at one point today. We saw massive bot activity, our community let us know that they were having trouble with deposits at Binance."

As per an official blog by Binance, it had halted the platform's all trading services to "undergo system maintenance," during which "trading, withdrawals and other account functions will be suspended." Initially, Binance refused to comment on the Syscoin’s contribution in halting the service, however, the exchange later confirmed that it was due to irregular transactions of a particular cryptocurrency.

Binance said, "Due to irregular trading on some APIs, Binance will remove all existing API keys as a precautionary security measure. All API users are requested to recreate their API key.," After this incident, the price of syscoin gushed by around 100% to nearly $0.5 which further declined to about $0.28.