Mega-exchange Binance stopped customers from withdrawing bitcoin for an hour on Sunday and for about three hours on Monday. The reason? Binance said it was down to a surge in “gas fees”, which are the payments made to crypto miners who use their computing power to process transactions on the blockchain. Binance said it hadn’t originally offered the miners a high enough fee, but that it had adjusted its transaction fees higher and cleared the backlog.
The price of bitcoin fell slightly and crypto-related stocks also saw small declines.
In other Binance news, Reuters reported last week that Israel has seized around 190 crypto accounts at Binance since 2021, according to documents released by Israel’s counter-terror authorities. Two of these accounts were linked to Islamic State and dozens of others were owned by Palestinian firms connected to the Islamist Hamas group, the documents said.
Binance said in a blog post that it has been “working closely with international counter-terrorism authorities”. The company told U.S. senators in March that it checks users for connections to terrorism. In last week’s blog, it said that “bad actors don’t register accounts under the names of their criminal authorities.”
Israel’s seizures are an indication that governments are paying attention to crypto exchanges’ role in the financing of terrorism. For years, policymakers and regulators have raised concern over the use of crypto in illegal activities, such as money laundering and terrorist financing. The U.S. Treasury said in a report last year that the Islamic State had received crypto donations, accessed via crypto trading platforms (it didn’t specify which platforms) and last month Hamas said it would stop receiving funds in bitcoin, citing an increase in “hostile” activity against donors.
