Binance resumes USDC stablecoin withdrawals after temporary pause

Quick Take

Binance exchange has resumed USDC withdrawal requests after temporarily pausing it.
The exchange announced it worked on a token swap to increase its USDC reserves.

Binance has resumed processing withdrawal requests of the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin after pausing them for several hours.

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange platform by daily volume, temporarily stopped processing USDC withdrawals due to inadequate USDC reserves on the platform, according to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.

Binance holds a large majority of its stablecoin holdings, more than $11.5 billion in Paxos-issued BUSD, according to Nansen data. To increase its USDC reserves, it made efforts to swap its BUSD holdings with USDC.

However, any token swaps into USDC required routing funds through a New York bank which was not yet open, Zhao said. This hindered the exchange's ability to process these transactions, so the exchange temporarily paused USDC withdrawals while it conducted a token swap.

Users have been withdrawing large amounts of funds from Binance, including USDC and other stablecoins. Since yesterday, Binance has seen a net outflow of over $2 billion in various crypto assets, according to estimates from Simon Cousaert, director of data at The Block.

Binance claims to hold more than $60 billion worth of assets across all of its wallets.