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Binance See Withdrawals of $1.9 Billion in Last 24 Hours, Data Firm Nansen Says (reuters.com) 80

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Binance has seen withdrawals of $1.9 billion in the last 24 hours, blockchain data firm Nansen said on Tuesday, as the world's biggest crypto exchange said it had "temporarily paused" withdrawals of the USDC stablecoin. From a report: Scrutiny of how crypto exchanges such as Binance and its now-bankrupt former rival FTX handle customer deposits is under close scrutiny from users and regulators. FTX's founder Sam Bankman-Fried was charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday with defrauding investors. Binance, whose dominance of crypto was cemented by the fall of FTX, last week tweeted a so-called proof-of-reserves report by audit firm Mazars. The report showed its holdings of bitcoin exceeded customer deposits on a single day in November. The $1.9 billion ethereum-based withdrawals marks the largest daily outflow over a 24-hour period since June 13, the Nansen data showed, and accounted for the majority of the funds being pulled in the last seven days.
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Binance See Withdrawals of $1.9 Billion in Last 24 Hours, Data Firm Nansen Says More

Binance See Withdrawals of $1.9 Billion in Last 24 Hours, Data Firm Nansen Says

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  • Rats off a sinking ship. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TWX ( 665546 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @12:04PM (#63127350)

    Looks like we're watching the bubble burst, and seeing just how much of a pump-and-dump scam cryptocurrency is.

    Having been in IT industry when the dotcom bubble burst, this feels familiar. All we need are some aeron chairs.

    • BTC is up today, though. Not sure what to make of that.

    • I've been saying that for a while now, the whole thing has a lot of that dot.com bubble.

      Then again, I feel the same about the Metastasis. A bunch of people pumping money into it because they fear that if they don't they'll miss the bus to prosperity, even though nobody has even the slightest clue how the hell this should be made profitable.

      • Question if anyone knows. So this article is about a stablecoin getting heavy withdrawals. Do stablecoins pay interest? If not, wow what a sweet deal for binance. Give us your money, we stick it in a bank/treasuries and we earn 3-4% on it, and we pinky swear we will give you back your dollars when you ask. Why would anyone trade dollars for such a "asset" in today's high interest rate environment. Is it just a hangover from the 0% interest rate days when holding cash really was the same as a stablecoin in t

      • Surely ".. A bunch of people pumping SOMEONE ELSE'S money into it because they fear that if they don't they'll ....."

    • Aeron chairs? I want reasonably priced graphics cards.
      • I enjoyed the Aeron chair reference too. So quaint. This time it's $90,000 cars, and $1M+ homes. There is just so much wealth floating around, even now. $200/day ski lift tickets, and still a traffic jam to get there.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Sorry, but I have 4 * 4k screens, I'd need two cards, each with 2 hdmi ports. The 4090 only has one hdmi port. I expect midrange cards to go down in price over time, and mid-range is more than enough.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      It was an obvious scam many years ago. At it's heart it's a crowd sourced ponzi onto which more scams are stacked. The problem is that people are idiots and successive waves of them have "invested" in this bullshit only to get badly burned. Doubtless things will go quiet for a bit and the idiots will be back with a vengeance.

    • Re:Rats off a sinking ship. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dynamo ( 6127 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @04:52PM (#63128260) Journal

      Crypto itself is not the problem. It's these ridiculous "stablecoins" that people accept at face value and the stupid habit people have of leaving their crypto on exchanges for longer than absolutely necessary to make trades. If you just make your trades and take your BTC or ETH offline to personal hardware storage asap, you won't get screwed. If you leave it in someone else's custody, or trade it for some other type of crypto than those two, you are likely to regret it.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I haven't seen a crap drawing of a cartoon ape for a while. Maybe they are all stored offline now.

    • The problem is not cryptocurrency. cryptocurrency is a novel and really great invention. It put you in charge of your money, like cash.

      Your government can not just freeze your assets if they start to dislike you, like they do if you are foolish enough to keep your money in the bank. The bank can not scam you with sky-high fees and interests, once they convince you to spend more money than you own.

      The problem is unregulated banking - in this instance "crypto exchanges". Unregulated banking is always a horr

  • HODL (Score:3)

    by bettodavis ( 1782302 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @12:24PM (#63127418)
    Remember to hold the door open while we get the f-out.

  • Ha! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Inglix the Mad ( 576601 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @12:30PM (#63127444)
    QUICK! Someone start a Crypto Island where they can have no regulation and true libertarian freedoms!

    Crypto, on average, appears to have been an efficient way to separate fools from their money.

  • Make Greed Great Again (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1849.
    1929.
    197x.
    199x.
    2002.
    2008.
    2020.
    Repeating the same mistakes expecting different outcomes, priceless.

  • Decentralization? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Morpeth ( 577066 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @12:37PM (#63127458)

    Can someone who really understands this explain the 'withdrawal' part? I thought the ideal/goal of crypto was to get away from centralized currency so that banks etc didn't have the kind of power/control they do? If an exchange can halt withdrawals, like banks did say during the Great Depression in the US, what's the point? Not being sarcastic here, I am genuinely curious (and confused)

    • The idea of an exchange holding your crypto/crapto coins was that if you have to sell the tokens eventually on an exchange, why not just let them hold the tokens "for your convenience." After all, it's always going up, so if you wanted to sell, they would always have plenty of buyers, so what could go wrong?

      Now we know, and still people buy into shitcoins. Not because it makes any sense, but because they are so invested in the idea of easy riches that they NEED to believe that this scam actually can't fa

    • Re:Decentralization? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by itsme1234 ( 199680 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @12:50PM (#63127494)

      On-chain transactions are slow (usually a few per second, at most) and expensive. Most "crypto" is anyway useless outside exchanges. Therefore they're acting like banks (or if you want more like Paypal), except much worse because they come with all the drawbacks you can imagine and then some, plus no guarantees and oversight.

    • Re:Decentralization? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Smidge204 ( 605297 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @12:56PM (#63127520) Journal

      The problem is in order for crypto to have any value or utility at all, you NEED a central authority of some kind. In theory anyone can maintain a blockchain with enough hard drive space and processing power, but there are two immediate problems that pop up in practice;

      First, transactions are only valid/recognized on the blockchain they occur on. In order for me to send or receive anything with you, we both need to be on the same chain. Otherwise, my chain can show a transaction that said you gave me all your tokens and there's no way to demonstrate that transaction is true or false. Anyone can write anything they want in their own ledger, but you need a common ledger to sum it all up and verify it.

      Second, the sheer volume of transactions requires so much storage and processing power that only people or groups with rather deep pockets can afford the infrastructure.

      The practical result of these two problems is the creation of a central authority not entirely unlike a bank is inevitable. It's literally all of the power mongering and manipulation of central banks that cryptobros complain about, with none of the accountability.

      So to answer your question:

      > what's the point?

      The point is a bunch of Dunning-Kruger type assholes who don't actually understand economics saw an opportunity to grift a bunch of other Dunning-Kruger type assholes who understand economics even less. It's a grift from top to bottom even for the ones who have the upmost sincerity and good faith, because they're also only in it for themselves, ultimately...
      =Smidge=

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by King_TJ ( 85913 )

        I'm not sure I quite follow your conclusion though?

        While yes, there has to be a single blockchain the users all agree upon as "the official one" tracking all of their transactions? The original concept behind Bitcoin and other similar crypto-coins was that you put trust in the software code itself. (I mean, otherwise, how do you know the "wallet" software you're using isn't just sharing your super-secret encryption key with its author, who collects them all up to siphon off everyone's deposits at some point

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dynamo ( 6127 )

        No, you don't understand how a blockchain works. It's very much possible to do transactions without any central authority, that is the ENTIRE point of cryptocurrency.

        • I am a crypto skeptic, but I agree with you that the criticism above are not well argued. Yes, it is possible for a decentralized system to execute transactions. Whether the price/convenience of a particular cryptocurrency is attractive in the long term is worthy of debate.

    • An exchange will have no choice but to halt withdrawals if they don't actually have the coin. The mismatch is that the exchanges are executing trades for coin that they don't have (in Binance's case, x to USDC), they can't honor the withdrawal of said coin immediately since there is a lag in settling the contract, or something even more complex than this simple explanation. Supposedly...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kiviQr ( 3443687 )
      Move your coin from exchange (where they own it) to cold storage (where you own it).

    • Re:Decentralization? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jason Earl ( 1894 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @01:13PM (#63127572) Homepage Journal

      The withdrawal part is that people are taking their Bitcoin, which is currently stored in Binance's wallet, and they are moving it to a private wallet. The reason that they are doing this is simple. If the exchange goes bankrupt and your bitcoins are in their wallet then you lose your bitcoins. That's basically what happened to the people who had their Bitcoin at FTX, and Celsius, and even Mt. Gox.

      • FWIW, the MTGOX situation wasn't a bankruptcy. They were the victim of a malicious actor who gained unauthorized access to an unencrypted wallet file and "stole" the Bitcoin by moving it to here: https://www.blockchain.com/btc... [blockchain.com]

        • It was an inside job, didn't you hear about the Willy trading bot scandal? Half the volume on the exchange was fake, just to drive up prices. They bought and sold coins that didn't exist, ran the price up to $1000.
          Bitcoin has been a tool of fraudsters since pretty much the beginning. When will people learn?

        • I was under the impression that they didn't steal all of the Bitcoin. Just enough to drive Mt. Gox into bankruptcy. Either way it is bad news for people that had their crypto on that exchange.

    • Binance coin and really all stablecoins are cryptocurrency in name only. They aren't on a decentralized network and are controlled/issued by one entity. Inevitably people would ask "What's the point?" The point of these are to be able to digitally move dollars around instantly and verifiably. What you are doing that for depends on who you talk to

    • Nope you're right. What your witnessing here is the inevitable market consolidation that always happens. It's a feature of capitalism that is impossible to get away from without a third party intervening. In other words the government.

      For universally required services it's basically impossible to prevent them from centralizing. This is true for a variety of reasons including market consolidation as winners and losers emerge and economies of scale and the general desire for more efficient and usable syst

      • I only want to express a minor disagreement with the following point:

        The best explanation I've heard of it is that cryptocurrency is speed running 300 years of financial market history and mistakes

        We have Linear A [wikipedia.org]/B and a variety of hieroglyphics and cuneiform [wikipedia.org].

        Pottery may be hidden within delta sediments extending to a depth of over 130 meters [wikipedia.org] out on the continental shelves. Exemplars of our earliest yet discovered pottery [wikipedia.org] that could potentially contain scripts or symbols date back approximately going on ~2

    • To answer your question, the crypto is decentralized, and the exchange you've chosen to use can do whatever the fuck they want... because it's not regulated and everything is still, at the end of the day, tied to the US dollar.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      If you give your money to someone like these companies, you've not decentralised anything. You given it to a company to decentralise it on your behalf. Good luck with that when the bankruptcies hit.

      If you wanted to decentralise, you'd run your own Bitcoin wallet, etc. which would be safe.

      Quite how you then convert it to a usable fund, product or service? Well that's your problem now.

    • Holding reserves in exchanges is for suckers. It's a necessary evil when wanting to buy/sell with fiat, but it doesn't mean you have to leave your tokens there.

  • time for yet another... (Score:3)

    by bkmoore ( 1910118 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @12:45PM (#63127476)
    ...good old-fashioned bank run.
  • They were trump's accountants!
  • ..because it was 'more stable' [slashdot.org] - is the house of cards finally going down?

  • Should be interesting to watch (Score:3)

    by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @01:18PM (#63127594) Journal

    This should be interesting to watch if its not snuffed out rather quickly some how.

    Seems to me Binance's latest moves in the wake of the FTX collapse has been to set itself up as Crypto's JP Morgan, the lender of last resort.

    If this plus their money laundering legal troubles (probably not distinct issues really as the latter is likely the reason behind many of the withdraws) forces them to have pull back from supporting other crypto business with capitalization issues it could get ugly fast. If they actually faulter in the short term I think it would really mean the end of the industry

    • I question whether there should be any "industry" that isn't paying employees with the same currency they use to sell the product they manufacture. BitCoin has no need for centralized banks or "wallets" which defeat the entire purpose. The true scam here started the moment trust was involved: "Let me just hold your stuff for you, I promise you'll get it back!"

      1st commandment: Do not hold unfounded false (subjective) faith in anything. Hold only true (objective), proven and continuously re-tested faith in

  • temporarily paused withdrawals (Score:3)

    by zmollusc ( 763634 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @01:53PM (#63127726)

    Haha, idiots. If you don't want your assets controlled by some random company, you should put them into this decentralised crypto currency that I keep hearing about.

  • Its not clear to me reading these stories whether the companies are being asked for dollar deposits back, or if they are being asked for crypto assets back which are worth the dollar amount cited.

    The point of these various exchanges is to be a place people can deposit their crypto hoards and trade them, yes? So do they also hold large dollar deposits which people can attempt to withdraw?

    • This article refers to blockchain data analysis so the crypto part is what's known and the sums quoted. I don't know if there's a way to infer from that or using other public data to see if people are cashing out with actual money (banks would know but for regulatory and obvious reasons they don't blabber all over twitter).

  • I have nothing useful to comment except that I'll be very happy if crypto as a whole dies in a fire

  • "Scrutiny of how crypto exchanges such as Binance and its now-bankrupt former rival FTX handle customer deposits is under close scrutiny from users and regulators."

    So the scrutiny itself is under scrutiny. Who watches the watchmen, indeed.

  • Ah (Score:2)

    by ledow ( 319597 )

    So that's why Coinbase was trying to make me buy USDC yesterday.

    How is that legal, by the way?

  • The girl next door tells me that her class of ten year olds all understand the fake currency situation. Yet anyone on /. who calls it a scam is rewarded with 'Insightful' for saying the same things that were said yesterday and the day before. Day after day these insipid comments fill the site (61 comments on this at the moment) with zero insight. Great for Slashdot if they want to cultivate the eyes of stupid people, not good for a reader hoping for real insight.

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