The quality of exchanges leaves much to be desired

The past week can hardly be called successful for several large cryptocurrency exchanges. Thefts, break-ins, technical work - what are the causes of the problems and, according to experts, are there options for solving them?

Suspension of trading on Binance

On January 6, the exchange announced that it would suspend trading for 12 hours due to “technical work,” which caused a flurry of indignation among users. This is natural, because no one notified about the suspension in advance.

Many users and experts, including John McAfee, still believe that the exchange is hiding something and could have been hacked. Although company representatives deny the possibility of hacking, by a strange coincidence, the ZenDesk portal, on which the exchange publishes news, was also out of order.

Binance promised to return to work on February 9 at 04:00 UTC. In fact, the technical work lasted as much as 32 hours and only then the exchange began to function. As an apology for the inconvenience, Binance will reduce fees by 70% (0.03% per transaction, 0.015% when paying with BNB tokens) until February 24.

BitGrail Hack

The famous Italian exchange is on the verge of bankruptcy.  On Friday, representatives of the platform reported the theft of 17 million Nano tokens totaling about $170 million.

According to information on the resource’s website, experts identified an unconfirmed transaction, as a result of which the currency was so quickly and quietly withdrawn from the wallet. However, as BitGrail representatives said, there is no reason to fear that funds will be withdrawn in another currency. It was also said that the hack was the fault of the company itself, and not as a result of problems with the cryptocurrency protocol.

The owner of the company wrote on Twitter that the exchange is currently insolvent. “We are transparent, the money was stolen” - this phrase suggests that BitGrail will not be able to fully compensate for the losses of investors.

Nano representatives claim that, most likely, BitGrail knew about the problem long before they announced the hack to the public.

The fact that the two above-mentioned events occurred simultaneously gives rise to certain thoughts. Are they related? Hardly. But the fact that recently large exchanges have been forced to undergo technical work or have been hacked once again confirms that the main problem is the imperfection of the security systems of crypto platforms.

Recall that earlier the CoinCheck exchange was hacked and attackers were able to withdraw 260,000 NEM worth $ 523 million.