Bitcoin (BTC) transactions are moving from Huobi cryptocurrency exchange to OKEx despite the second exchange having temporarily suspended crypto withdrawals.
It has been reported by crypto tracking service Whale Alert that a total of 1,995 BTC ($22.5 million) was sent from Huobi to OKEx shortly after OKEx officially announced it was suspending withdrawals on October 16.
However, the funds were transferred in two separate BTC transactions worth 998 BTC ($11.3 million) and 997 BTC ($11.3 million) at 3:51 a.m. EST and 06:22 a.m. EST.
🚨 998 #BTC (11,333,911 USD) transferred from #Huobi to #OKEx Tx: https://t.co/m267yjmGjh — Whale Alert (@whale_alert) October 16, 2020
🚨 997 #BTC (11,265,034 USD) transferred from #Huobi to #OKEx Tx: https://t.co/F6ax4K5RdK — Whale Alert (@whale_alert) October 16, 2020
As per the report, the transfers raise some questions as 1,995 BTC is now locked on the platform due to the platform temporarily blocking crypto withdrawals.
Someone from the crypto community commented on Twitter:
“Dude go the opposite way,”
Others suggested that the issue could be a result of delayed BTC transactions.
Guess This whale didn’t get the memo that OKEX has disabled withdrawals for an indefinite amount of time. Authorities in China abducted one of their key holders needed to withdraw funds. Person could be gone days, weeks, months. Who knows — SellUtheTop (@SellUTheTop) October 16, 2020
The transactions from Huobi bring a significant amount of Bitcoin to OKEx’s total BTC balance.
According to data from BTC balance-based exchange ranking Chain.info, OKEx now holds a total of 276,184 BTC on its cold vault, hot wallets, and deposit wallets.
Also, Whale Alert sounded the horn on another large BTC move, but this time the funds seemingly somehow left OKEx, amid closed withdrawals. Someone sent 3,500 Bitcoin, worth around $39,627,432 at the time of transfer, to Binance from OKEx.
Whale alert tweeted:
“We suspect these are internal exchange transfers. We are investigating the matter right now.”
While referring to the 3,500 BTC OKEx withdrawal tweet from Whale Alert, a public statement from OKEx explained:
“OKEx’s wallet team has confirmed that the origin wallet addresses in said transactions do not belong to OKEx. The chief economist at major blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis also confirmed in a tweet today that the transactions in question had been ‘mislabelled’ and were not in fact from OKEx.”
Source: Cointelegraph