The management of the trading platform, one of the market leaders, announced the safety of users' funds and named the reason for disabling the withdrawal of assets
Crypto exchange OKEx, which ranks third in the world in terms of trading turnover, has suspended the withdrawal of funds. She announced this in her official blog . The management explained that one of the holders of the private key, which is required to confirm transactions, does not get in touch, as he cooperates with law enforcement agencies. OKEx was unable to promptly respond to the topplabs.org request.
The head of OKEx, Jay Hao, stressed in his Twitter account that users' funds are safe, trading and other functions are operational. Cooperation of one of the key holders with law enforcement agencies concerns his personal affairs and has nothing to do with the exchange, he added.
According to Chinese newspaper Caixin , the exchange's founder, Star Xu, was detained by police about a week ago and has not appeared on the workgroup since. The journalists referred to two sources close to OKEx.
In the crypto community, there were suspicions that the suspension of withdrawal of funds and cooperation with law enforcement agencies could be the result of illegal activities of OKEx users. Red Lee, co-founder of 8btc, spoke on his Twitter account of rumors that 800 accounts of an unnamed exchange were involved in money laundering.
The withdrawal of funds from OKEx stopped at 7:00 Moscow time, the analytical service Glassnode said on its Twitter account. Experts emphasized that since that moment, no one has withdrawn cryptocurrency from the balances of the trading platform. At the moment, there are about 200 thousand BTC on her accounts, or 1.1% of the current issue of the coin.
After the announcement of OKEx, the market showed a slight decline. The bitcoin rate fell by 1.1%, to $ 11.3 thousand, Ethereum fell 2.6%, to $ 370.
Over the past month, negative incidents have affected several exchanges. In early October, the management of crypto-derivatives BitMEX, including its founder Arthur Hayes, were under investigation. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) accuses them of serving an unregistered trading platform and violating regulations, including anti-money laundering and customer identification. Hayes and several other senior representatives of the company later left their positions.
In September, the KuCoin exchange was hacked. Unidentified persons stole the users' cryptocurrency for $ 280 million, which became the third largest hack in the history of the cryptoindustry. Johnny Liu, CEO of the company, promised to return all funds to clients.