Binance users have reported that the biggest crypto exchange in the world asked them to return coins they didn’t have, CoinDesk wrote. Until then, they won’t be allowed to make any withdrawals.
On Thursday, the company said:
We discovered a minor issue with DOGE network withdrawals on Binance after carrying out a version update on 2021-11-10. As a result, we have temporarily suspended DOGE network withdrawals until this issue is resolved. Binance is actively working with the DOGE project team to resolve the issue.
A big problem for users
The upgrade is not without consequences. The users claim Binance initiated withdrawal without their permission. Now, it is asking for the coins back, but the users don’t have them in their Binance accounts.
A Reddit user wrote:
When I try to withdraw on Binance, I have now a message which indicates “Unable to withdraw with account in arrears” and an astronomic amount of Dogecoin is indicated. I didn’t use Doge margin recently, since my remaining Doge are stuck on HitBTC. But I just found that several of my account on other exchanges received Dogecoin amounts from a Binance Doge address (mHK1), sadly including my HitBTC account. Of course, I never initiated these withdrawals, and anyway, it isn’t possible to withdraw more Doge than the balance, so even, a leak of my 2FA couldn’t justify such a result.
A Catch 22
Users of Binance told CoinDesk their withdrawal function on the exchange would remain inactive unless they returned the funds, which they don’t have.
On Thursday, Dogecoin developers tweeted that the initial withdrawal transactions seemed to have been follow-up attempts to perform transactions requested years ago, which were dormant due to inadequate fees.
Dogecoin network upgrade to blame?
Dogecoin upgraded its network a few days ago, which seems to have triggered the dormant transactions, according to the tweets. The upgrade closed “a new minimum fee recommendation” for all network participants according to the upgrade’s github page.
Too little, too late
Therefore, the developers therefore believe that the dormant transactions were reattempted even when the users didn’t have the funds anymore.
The Dogecoin developers added that they attempted to cooperate with the exchange when it contacted them about the dormant transactions. This happened over a year ago. Ultimately, they did not get any information as to whether the exchange tried to resolve the issue based on their instructions.
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