Crypto exchange Binance says trading will resume tomorrow

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance, which is recovering from last week’s security incident which allowed hackers to steal 7,000 bitcoins (roughly $40 million), said on Monday it has strengthened its security and promised it will allow deposits and withdrawals on Tuesday, May 14. 

Following the hack, Binance halted all deposits and withdrawals to its platform until it could fully investigate what had caused the security breach. Trading on Binance was allowed to continue. 

“In the past few days, we have made some significant overhauls to our system, with a large number of advanced security features added and/or completely re-architected. We will share details on some of the changes later,” Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao wrote in a blog post. 

“We aim to fully resume deposits and withdrawals on Tuesday. The time will be communicated at a later stage, depending on how the testing goes. This upgrade will require a trading halt,” he wrote, promising another update tomorrow, as well as a longer update with more details after all operations on the platform have been resumed. 

The news of the hack, as well as halted withdrawals and deposits on one of the world largest cryptocurrency exchanges, didn’t do much to stop Bitcoin’s meteoric price rise. Over the weekend, Bitcoin at one point reached the price of $7,500, the highest since August 2018, and more than double the price from just three months ago. Bitcoin’s price has tapered off significantly on Monday, and is currently at $7,029. 

Disclosure: The author of this text owns, or has recently owned, a number of cryptocurrencies, including BTC and ETH.