Top-ranked cryptocurrency exchange CoinBene has reassured users that its prolonged maintenance downtime is not due to a hack, as some community members had feared. The exchange made its official announcement in an official tweet today, March 27.
With the announcement, CoinBene has responded to users’ ongoing concerns that delays in processing deposits and withdrawals were signs of a possible platform hack.
In its statement, CoinBene — currently ranked 4th on CoinMarketCap by adjusted daily trade volume — clarifies that is has been undertaking measures to update the exchange’s wallet immediately. The exchange reports that it had received news from multiple other — unnamed — crypto exchanges of recent thefts of their users’ assets. The CoinBene security team says it then took swift action to protect and upgrade the wallet’s security to protect their users.
The announcement, emphasizing this has been a preventive — not reactive — measure, reassures users that:
“User assets on CoinBene platform are 100% secure, our platform promises that if any user assets will be lost, we will compensate 100% [sic]. […] The CoinBene security team monitors any anomalies at all times and will issue a warning the first time to prevent any possible risks.”
The statement also instructs any user aware of a security risk to their account to contact the platform’s support team. In a separate tweet in the same thread, CoinBene emphasized that users should not worry about the prolonged maintenance currently underway.
Evidently relieved twitter users responded positively to CoinBene’s clarification, although stated it would have been preferable to issue an announcement sooner to quash community concerns.
One user expressed their ongoing frustration over frozen deposits, to which CoinBene responded that Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Tether (USDT) deposits have already been reopened, and others are set to be opened “asap.”
As previously reported, community members had been closely eyeing open blockchain transaction data records in light of their suspicions surrounding CoinBene. One industry figure had proposed that massive outgoing transactions from CoinBene shown on major statistics website for Ethereum, Etherscan, might serve as an evidence of an attack — concerns that a fellow sleuther assuaged by noting that the transactions in fact appeared to indicate transfers to a wallet designated as cold storage.
In a recent report to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, crypto index provide Bitwise Asset Management stated that it believes CoinBene’s trading activity is suspicious, especially due to the fact that trading timesteps frequently coincide and the amounts of buying and selling are almost similar.
Just yesterday, Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange DragonEx notified its users that it suffered a hack on March 24, the full details and scales of which are yet to emerge.
