Champeng Zhao, the founder and CEO of Binance, has denied that his company purchased 101,266 Bitcoin units during the crash following an increase in the exchange’s cold wallet holdings.
The largest cryptocurrency exchange bought 101,266 Bitcoin on Sunday according to a story published by CoinGape that has since been corrected citing moves to a Binance cold wallet as evidence.
Champeng Zhao, the CEO of the exchange, corrected the article on Twitter, noting that the increase reflected deposits by users onto the exchange.
Bitcoin had a catastrophic price drop on Saturday, falling below its previous bull cycle peak of $19,511, which has never happened before. The flagship cryptocurrency’s price dropped as low as $17,500.
The increase in Binance’s Bitcoin wallet balance reflects more tokens being moved onto exchanges as investors and holders continue to panic and sell their holdings. As more traders cash in their crypto holdings for money, increased exchange inflows have been a repeating trend throughout this downturn.
Binance’s cold wallet now holds 353,863 BTC tokens, valued at $7.24 billion at the time of writing. The wallet has been active since December 8, 2017 and now has roughly 2% of all bitcoins mined to date.
Crypto banks such as Celsius were forced to put withdrawals on hold due to the market’s severe volatility and Binance users experienced a similar issue. According to CZ, a blocked transaction produced a backlog last week, causing withdrawals on the Bitcoin network to be halted on the exchange, but the issue was fixed within a few hours.