Binance Announces Delayed ETH Withdrawal Requests Following Shapella Upgrade

On April 13th, cryptocurrency exchange Binance revealed that Ethereum (ETH) withdrawal requests may take several weeks to process. This announcement was made just a day after the Shapella upgrade went live on the Ethereum mainnet.

The Shapella upgrade is one of the most highly-anticipated events in the crypto space for 2023. It enables ETH validators to withdraw their locked funds. However, Binance stated its need to set a daily redemption quota for each user due to the Ethereum network’s processing limitations.

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, announced that its users will be able to redeem their locked ETH funds starting April 19th. In the announcement, the company also revealed that unstaking requests may take between 15 days to several weeks to be completed.

Binance attributed the timeline to the total amount of ETH withdrawal requests by staking participants and the Ethereum network’s processing limitations. It was a major factor in Binance’s ETH redemption structure and timeline.

Binance also clarified that BETH (Binance’s tokenized version of staked ETH) tokens locked in pending withdrawal requests would not accrue any ETH 2.0 staking rewards. Additionally, users cannot cancel their withdrawal requests once submitted.

Data from rated.network showed that there are over 400,000 partial withdrawal requests and nearly 30,000 full withdrawal requests. However, a significant number of these withdrawals are forced, as US-based crypto exchange Kraken had to discontinue its staking service following a $30 million settlement with the SEC.

On April 12th, at exactly 10:27 p.m. (UTC), the highly-anticipated Shapella upgrade launched on the Ethereum mainnet. The hard fork consists of modifications to the execution layer (Shanghai) and the consensus layer (Capella) of the network. But, most importantly, it enabled ETH validators to withdraw their staked funds from the network.