© Reuters
Investing.com — Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, halted withdrawals for the second time in a dozen hours on Monday, citing blockchain congestion due to a high volume of pending trades .
This action was taken due to a “significant volume of Binance withdrawal transactions still pending,” Binance said on Twitter (NYSE:), as the exchange did not anticipate a recent increase in Bitcoin gas fees. .
These fees are paid by users of a blockchain to its validators each time they wish to make a transaction on the network. The has recently seen a spike in gas fees due to increased interest in a new token standard, BRC-20, which has spurred the launch of several new memecoins this year.
Earlier in the day on Sunday, Binance suspended withdrawals for about an hour, citing network congestion. Other major cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase (NASDAQ:) and Kraken have not announced a pause in withdrawals.
BRC-20, which was launched earlier this year by an encoder known as “Domo”, allows users to deploy new tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain. This initiative resulted in the appearance of several new memcoins, which triggered a speculative frenzy where users rushed to be the first buyers of a new wave of tokens.
This has led to an increase in trading activity on the Bitcoin blockchain, pushing gas fees to nearly two-year highs. But traders have also fallen prey to a slew of new pump-and-dump schemes, a recurring incident in cryptocurrency markets.
Binance had also listed several of the new memecoins generated under the BRC-20 standard, including the . But the exchange had also warned users of a potential speculative bubble, saying the tokens had no use.
The broader crypto markets weakened on Monday, with bitcoin down 2.2%, while Binance’s native token, , fell 1.5%. The second largest cryptocurrency in the world, , fell almost 2%.