OKEx users on Crypto Twitter expressed their frustration in the past few days regarding the exchange’s downtime for withdrawals.
Now, the community prepares its ‘pitchforks’ as a reaction to the extremely uncertain situation.
As a reminder, the founder of OKEx Star Xu was arrested by Chinese authorities on October 16. When asked about the influence the event will have on the trading platform, OKEx responded by stating that the founder has no relationship with the exchange anymore. However, this statement was strange for many as an announcement on the same day revealed that cryptocurrency withdrawals will be disabled for some time.
It becomes apparent that Xu is indeed one of the multi-sig private key holders and that without him, it is impossible to transfer assets. The question remains, what will happen to OKEx now that the fate of thousands of coins and tokens will be decided by China? The cryptocurrency community became aware of this fact and is now asking the exchange to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
At one point, users thought that OKEx enabled withdrawals for insiders and whales due to a mistake made by cryptocurrency tracking bot WhaleAlert. The Twitter account of this platform mislabelled an address as an official OKEx wallet. A warning post on the account shared that funds were moved from the exchange to Huobi, which caused the initial confusion.
The trading platform’s CEO soon shared that no asset outflows were handled since the initial withdrawal suspension on October 16. Moreover, he noted that there has been a continuous in-flow activity, meaning that traders deposited assets into the exchange.
Bitcoin whales seem to move BTC to OKEx, not outside it
‘No transparency, the CEO should act like CZ,’ stated OKEx users
In his Twitter post, CEO Jay Hao also shared that ‘your assets are safe.’ He stated that the exchange will do its best to resume withdrawals ‘ASAP.’ However, this was not enough to reassure the exchange’s users and bring back trust. Some within the Crypto Twitter community responded by saying that it is strange that one of the largest exchanges has disabled withdrawals for such a long time.
Others have shared their disappointment in OKEx’s behavior during the last week. One follower complained that the CEO is not transparent on the issue and that he does not frequently share updates. The user compared Jay Hao’s lack of activity with an exchange CEO that actively tweets whenever an issue arises.
“Where is your CEO @JayHao8? He has to interact and give updated info frequently. When something happens with Binance; CZ tweets every hour,” he commented.
Another user shared the opinion that the reputation of OKEx is at stake. He noted that billions of dollars are locked for days and that the exchange did nothing to be transparent. Other traders started coming up with conspiracy theories, claiming that the exchange was hacked and lost all of its money. However, we can clearly see via on-chain statistics that there were no significant transfers in the past week.
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