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OKEx CEO Jay Hao explains the $96 million withdrawal worth of BTC

Photo of: Janeth Diamond
by Janeth Diamond

Whale alert has sounded off an alarm for a huge transaction worth roughly $96.1 million all of it in Bitcoin. 

Source: Twitter

Whale Alert has databases with thousands of known addresses of individuals, exchanges, and even companies. Whale Alert is considered as an extremely popular service that tracks in particular large cryptocurrency transactions. It is constantly adding and updating its records either manually or through trending technologies like Artificial Intelligence. It uses the tracking software to identify the transactions made to and from with respect to the connected addresses. Whale Alert is the much-needed respite in terms of transparency in the crypto space as it removes the factor of anonymity. 

It sounded off an alert and reported that roughly $96.1 million worth of Bitcoin had been withdrawn from the already troubled and controversial OKEx exchange to Binance yesterday. This obviously has led to several speculations from within the community because OKEx has suspended all withdrawal activities and users are not able to withdraw funds due to an ongoing police investigation. 

To come to the rescue of OKEx its CEO Jay Hao decided to address the issue and claimed that the addresses in question have been misinterpreted by the third parties. CryptoQuant, the on-chain data provider had later on claimed that nothing had been withdrawn from the exchange yet. 

Source: CryptoQuant

The Whale Alert warned all of its followers numbering to 268,000 that these issues could be internal exchange transfer and it has to be investigated further to understand the truth. 

OKEx is in for some trouble after it announced the suspension of withdrawals that led to an almost 3% drop in Bitcoin. One of its employees who were holding the private keys to approve withdrawals has been taken away for an investigation by the Chinese authorities. Due to this, the exchange had to put in a suspension order but has also assured that all of it has been done only keeping security in mind. Hao in fact apologized for this decision but mentioned that it has been done for security reasons. He said:

“All other activities — including deposits, spot trading, derivatives, staking, etc. — remain unaffected, and we would like to provide our assurance to all our customers that their funds are safe. The decision to temporarily pause withdrawals was taken with user security in mind.”

Sources close to OKEx have said that it was Xu Mingxing, the founder of OKEx, who “cooperated with public security investigations”. They also said that Xu Mingxing has been taken away by the Police at least a week ago and he had not appeared in the workgroup for many days. 

MingXing is OKEx’s sole private key holder and this is primarily the reason why the exchange cannot authorize withdrawals as of now. 

“We are unable to reveal any information that may put our users’ funds at risk. Suffice to say that OKEx maintains the highest security standards to protect our users’ funds and cannot authorize withdrawals without the most stringent checks.”