Binance – the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world is down

binance

If you are currently involved in crypto, in just about any way, then you know that Binance – the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world is down, and has been for most of the day today. Rumors quickly spread that the global exchange was hacked but the company has re-assured everyone via Twitter that they were troubleshooting a server issue and have not been compromised in any way.

The problem all started when Binance decided to perform “system maintenance” yesterday and told users that performance could be impacted while it was taking place.

binance-system-maintenance-feb-7-2018

People seemed pretty happy with Binance for their transparency as, at the time, with roughly 2,000 people liking that particular tweet. Then things, uh, didn’t go quite according to plan…the CEO later tweeted out that Binance experience a “server issue” which was “causing some data to be out of sync” which is the last thing you want to hear from a company where you have a bunch of money invested.

binance-ceo-tweet-feb-7-2018

This of course cause widespread panic and led many people to wonder…was there really a server issue or was Binance hacked? The media immediately started covering the story and word spread quickly through the cryptocurrency community.

binance-suspends-cryptocurrency-trading

There was quite an uprising on Reddit and across other cryptocurrency communities across the web with users complaining about the company deciding to do what many called “surprise maintenance” on the exchange.

While I was surprised this happened in some ways, I think it’s easy for everyone to forget that a year ago there was no Binance, heck, seven months ago the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange didn’t exist.

“Seven months ago Binance didn’t exist. Since then, its 1.4 million-transactions-per-second capability have attracted 6 million users, making it the world’s largest crypto-exchange.” (Source – Forbes, Feb 7th 2018)

For anyone who thinks “crypto is over” or “the golden years of crypto have passed” let me be the first to remind you that these are still the early days, big time. Imagine the stock market when Charles Schwab had been around for seven months…for those keeping score that would be October of 1971.

I just went to check on the status of Binance and, well, it’s still down.

binance-down-feb-2018

I’m off to bed but I’ll be interested to see how this pans out in the morning. This is a great reminder for crypto investors that they shouldn’t keep their money in exchanges. I’m a big fan of the Trezor and the Nano S and have both devices myself, while I use Binance to trade, I don’t keep too much on the exchange so most of it is tucked away for safe keeping because, like any early adopter should know, this kind of stuff can and will happen…in the early days.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton