Five weeks ago, OKEx suspended all account withdrawals after one of the key holders was detained by the police to assist in the investigation.
After holding customers’ funds for over a month, Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange OKEx has resumed normal services at 8.00 (UTC) on November 26. However, despite all the promised user loyalty reward campaigns, nothing stopped its customers from mass migrating to reliable exchanges.
OKEx Case and Suspension of Withdrawal Service
Five weeks ago, OKEx suspended all account withdrawals after one of the key holders was detained by the police to assist in the investigation. The prior unknown key holder has been identified as the founder of OKCoin and CEO of OK Group Mingxing “Star” Xu.
Prior to Thursday’s resumption of trading services, the exchange tested its withdrawal services on Wednesday, 0.02 BTC was moved out from an OKEx wallet.
The huge relief to OKEx customers has prompted them to undertake precautionary measures to keep their funds safe. Apparently, a huge portion of Bitcoins stored in the OKEx wallet have been observed to have been moved to other exchanges including Binance. According to on-chain analyst, Mason Jang, 54 OKEx accounts have withdrawn their funds and 2,822 BTC have been recorded on the outflows. Whereby 446 BTC have been moved to Binance.
Further analysis by CryptoQuant reveals that outflow recorded is the year-high in the block time frame. OKEx had a bitcoin reserve of 101,686 but has dropped to 98,821 BTC.
In addition to bitcoin withdrawal, Whale Alert spotted a transfer of 198,467 OKB worth approximately 1,033,580 from OKEx to FXT.
As news of withdrawal resumption spread amongst the crypto community, more withdrawals are expected to continue.
Notable Market Effect
The resumption of services at OKEx has coincided with increased crypto volatility that has seen Bitcoin drop a significant portion in a single day. Notably, the global crypto market cap has dropped by approximately 11.8% in the past 24 hours to around $515 billion.
Almost all digital assets have dropped with a double-digit figure in the last 24 hours, indicating increased activity in the whole ecosystem.
According to the metrics provided by CoinGecko, Bitcoin has dropped by approximately 10% in the past 24 hours. ETH, XRP, BCH and LTC have all dropped by 12.7%, 21.4%, 18.4% and 15.1% respectively.
However, at the time of writing the shedding had been somehow contained with most of them up by approximately 3%.
Bitcoin is trading around $17,339.10, Ethereum at $522.2, XRP at $0.543099, Bitcoin Cash at $279.38 and Litecoin at $75.27.
Although a huge relief to OKEx customers, it is a major lesson to all cryptocurrency investors that if you do not control and protect the private keys, then your assets are at risk of being stolen anytime.
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