Binance Temporarily Halts USDC Withdrawls
World's largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance has "temporarily suspended" withdrawals of USDC stablecoins while it conducts a "token exchange" the company said on Twitter on Tuesday.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said he expects withdrawals to resume when banks in New York open, allowing the exchange to convert BUSD for fiat currency and then for USDC.
In September, Binance conducted an “automatic BUSD conversion“, in which users’ stablecoins, USDC, USDP and TUSD, were exchanged into BUSD, a stablecoin backed by fiat money founded by Binance and Paxos (the New York-based issuer of the stablecoin).
Zhao said users can still withdraw other stablecoins, including BUSD and USDT, and deposits are unaffected.
On Tuesday, cryptanalysis firm Nansen claimed in a tweet that over $2 billion worth of cryptocurrencies left Binance in a single day, the highest 24-hour outflow since June.
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Binance’s halt on USDC withdrawals comes amid growing investor concerns about centralized crypto exchanges following the FTX crash.
Meanwhile, Binance is facing possible money laundering charges from the US government, which the exchange denies.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
