Binance Engines Await Reconciliation After Recovering from Bug

Binance exchange announced its platform encountered a bug earlier today, temporarily suspending spot trading. In a tweet, the exchange acknowledged awareness of the issues faced by traders while assuring them of efforts to resolve it as soon as possible.

We are aware of an issue impacting spot trading on Binance.

All spot trading is currently temporarily suspended as we work to resolve this as soon as possible.

New updates will be shared here.

— Binance (@binance) March 24, 2023

In a follow-up tweet, the CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, popularly known as CZ, explained that the issue bordered on the trailing stop order protocol on the platform. According to him, an initial analysis of the problem indicated the matching engine encountered a bug on a trailing stop order in a scenario that he considers to be “weird”.

CZ also informed the public that the exchange suspended deposits and withdrawals, following the standard operating procedure, and users’ funds are SAFU, an acronym for Secure Asset Funds for Users. SAFU is an emergency reserve held to protect users’ assets on the Binance exchange.

Following an estimated recovery time of 30 to 120 minutes, as indicated by CZ, he later updated users on Twitter that the issue has been resolved, with the affected engine back online. However, he noted that the platform needs more time for reconciliations and for the other engines to catch up.

He explained the reason for the unusual delay in reconciliation to be due to the timing of the attack. According to CZ, Binance engines take hourly snapshots, and unfortunately, the bug happened 57 minutes into the process. Hence, the reconciliation would take a bit longer than usual.

Respondents under CZ tweets appeared to be supportive, as there were hardly any critical responses. Instead, some respondents welcomed his updates while assuring him of their support.

Source