One of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges, OKEx, suspended withdrawals earlier today, which led to lots of confusion within the community and price slumps for the market.
CryptoPotato reached out to OKEx personnel, including CEO Jay Hao, to shed some light on the entire situation.
In the original statement, OKEx reasoned that the withdrawal suspension came because “one of our private key holders is currently cooperating with a public security bureau in investigations where required. We have been out of touch with the concerned private key holder.”
Apart from the rapid price dumps for cryptocurrency assets, further confusion emerged following reports claiming that police officers have taken away company founder Xu Mingxing over a week ago, and he hasn’t returned yet.
Company spokeswoman commented that the exchange OKEx is a “separate entity from OK Group, and, as such, we are not in a position to comment on any actions or activities related to Xu Mingxing.”
OKEx’s statement lacked any further details on the nature of the primary issue. However, the company reassured that all funds on the platform are safe and that only the withdrawals have been suspended. Other activities such as deposits, trading, derivatives, and staking, remain operational.
“We understand that the suspension of withdrawals directly impacts our users’ experience on OKEx, and we wholeheartedly apologize for this. The decision to pause withdrawals was taken with user security in mind.
As a world-leading exchange, user security is not something that OKEx can or will ever compromise on. We will do everything in our power to reinstate this service promptly and will provide updates on the matter as soon as possible.” – OKEx CEO Jay Hao told CryptoPotato.
The company emphasized that there’s no “cause for alarm” for users and they shouldn’t worry about their funds.
Following the developments, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) reassured Binance users that similar events couldn’t occur on his exchange.
“We have full redundancy structure that if anyone becomes unreachable, our funds are not stuck. Even from the early days, we especially made sure funds are not “dependent on CZ,” as I do travel extensively and are often in airplanes, etc.”
CZ also noted that Binance hadn’t sustained any single point of failure in its wallet systems or personnel structure. The cryptocurrency exchange uses a combination of “multi-sig, threshold signatures (TSS), and other technologies with no single point of dependency.”