Binance on Sunday temporarily locked out some accounts that seemed to be profiting amid abnormal price movements.
“We are aware of the abnormal price movements for certain trading pairs on #Binance , involving assets such as $SUN, $ARDR, $OSMO, $FUN and $GLM. Our team is investigating and taking appropriate actions in regards to the suspicious accounts,” the official Binance account said in a tweet at around 3:10 am ET.
In another tweet soon, it said the activity doesn’t seem to be due to stolen API keys or compromised accounts.
About an hour later, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted that internal investigations suggest that what appeared to be abnormal was just “market behavior.”
“One guy deposited funds and started buying. (Hackers don’t deposit). Other guys followed. Can’t see linkage between the accounts,” he informed.
The profiting accounts were temporarily frozen which caused a lot of reactions on social media. On Twitter, Binance was trending with 200,000 tweets in about 7 hours.
“We are aware of the concept of too much intervention from the platform, “too centralized” attacks, etc. There is a balance to how much we should intervene. Sometimes, these happen in free market, and we need to let it play out,” CZ said in his final tweet on the matter.
