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Binance Freezes Doge Withdrawals as Users Report Being Asked to Return Coins They Don’t Have

Binance users say that the crypto exchange is not allowing them to make any withdrawals until they return the DOGE.

(Getty Images)

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has temporarily suspended withdrawals of DOGE following an upgrade, the company said Thursday.

“We discovered a minor issue with DOGE network withdrawals on Binance after carrying out a version update on 2021-11-10,” Binance said in a post on Thursday morning without specifying what the “minor issue” was. “As a result, we have temporarily suspended DOGE network withdrawals until this issue is resolved. Binance is actively working with the DOGE project team to resolve the issue.”

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But the upgrade appears to have created significant problems for some of Binance’s users. Those users claim that the crypto exchange first initiated the withdrawal of dogecoin without their consent, and is now asking the users to return the dogecoin that they don’t have in their Binance accounts.

Screenshots shared with CoinDesk by several Binance users show that Binance asked them to return DOGE to the exchange, or else their withdrawal function on the exchange would remain deactivated. But the affected users said they didn’t even have any DOGE in their Binance accounts to return.

In a tweet thread on Thursday by a Twitter account representing dogecoin developers, the developers explained that the initial withdrawal transactions appear to have been follow-up attempts to carry out requested transactions from years ago that were “stuck” because of “insufficient fees.”

The Dogecoin network upgrade initiated a few days ago appears to have triggered those old transactions, according to the tweet thread. On the upgrade’s GitHub page, it says the upgrade made final “a new minimum fee recommendation” for all participants on the network; the developers therefore believe that the transactions that got stuck appear to have been retried, even when the users no longer own the coins.

The Dogecoin developers claimed that they tried to work with Binance when the exchange first reached out over a year ago on the “stuck transactions,” but they “were not notified as to whether or not [Binance] followed” their instructions to fix the problem.

Binance didn’t immediately respond to requests for more information about the issue.


Muyao Shen

Muyao was a markets reporter at CoinDesk based in Brooklyn, New York. She interned at CoinDesk in 2018 after the initial coin offering (ICO) craze before she moved to Euromoney Institutional Investor, one of Europe's largest business and financial information companies. She graduated from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism with a focus in business journalism.

Muyao Shen
Anna Baydakova

Anna writes about blockchain projects and regulation with a special focus on Eastern Europe and Russia. She is especially excited about stories on privacy, cybercrime, sanctions policies and censorship resistance of decentralized technologies. She graduated from the Saint Petersburg State University and the Higher School of Economics in Russia and got her Master's degree at Columbia Journalism School in New York City. She joined CoinDesk after years of writing for various Russian media, including the leading political outlet Novaya Gazeta. Anna owns BTC and an NFT of sentimental value.

Anna Baydakova