Binance Moves 4.4 Billion in Bitcoin and Freezes BTC Withdrawals: Here’s Why

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, made a significant Bitcoin move over the weekend, transferring $4.4 billion worth of BTC between its digital wallets.

This move occurred in two tranches of 117,000 and 40,000 coins, according to CryptoQuant’s Head of Research Julio Moreno, who analyzed on-chain data.

The exchange explained in a tweet on Monday that Bitcoin was moved between its hot and cold wallets due to address adjustments. Cold wallets, which are more secure because they store private crypto keys offline, are used to store a portion of users’ funds.

However, Binance also temporarily halted Bitcoin withdrawals twice over the weekend, citing network congestion on the Bitcoin blockchain. Binance blamed pending transactions with low gas fees for the issue and had to replace them with higher fees to enable miners to pick them up.

Although the exchange has now resumed Bitcoin withdrawals, the number of unconfirmed transactions still remains high, standing at over 400,000.

Part of the cause for the surge in fees can be attributed to the rising popularity of Ordinal inscriptions, which are NFTs created on the Bitcoin network.

Moreover, Bitcoin recorded a new all-time high for daily transactions last week, with nearly 568,300 transactions, attributed to JPMorgan Chase’s acquisition of First Republic.

Binance’s 24-hour trading volume has surpassed $7.6 billion, more than eight times that of the next-largest crypto exchange, Coinbase.

The flagship cryptocurrency is currently trading at $27,776, a 3.4% decrease over the past 24 hours.