Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said on Monday it has resolved technical issues with its Dogecoin wallet that resulted in users’ accounts being frozen. The reason for the more than two-week long debacle was an unfortunate coincidence of events, “not quite the shady circumstances that some had suggested,” the exchange wrote in a blog post.
“No single entity was at fault,” the exchange wrote, and “no one’s getting fired.”
Earlier in November, the exchange implemented a software update for the popular meme coin, and the update triggered a glitch: old users’ transactions from 2019 were re-played, and Binance re-sent DOGE from its wallet to the same addresses that users withdrew their coins to back in 2019. Binance said 1,634 users were affected by this issue.
As a result, the exchange lost some funds from its treasury, so it then turned back to users whose transactions were replayed are asked them to return the DOGE. However, the users didn’t even know their old transactions had been repeated, and some of them didn’t even have any DOGE in their accounts anymore, they told CoinDesk.
Binance told those users they had to return the coins; otherwise, any crypto on their balance equivalent to the amount erroneously sent by the exchange would be frozen. One week later, Elon Musk tweeted at Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, saying that the situation “sounds shady.”
Soon after that, Binance published an update saying it was rebuilding its dogecoin wallet.
In today’s blog post, the exchange blamed the issue on “a combination of unlikely factors” related to the Dogecoin blockchain upgrade from the previous version.
“What began as a fairly straightforward upgrade, turned into an issue where Binance users were unable to withdraw DOGE for the last 17 days,” the exchange said.
According to the affected users, who have been exchanging updates in a dedicated Telegram group, most of them finally got their accounts unfrozen at some point last week. However, one user told CoinDesk that he’s still waiting for his situation to be resolved.
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