Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, twice briefly paused bitcoin ( BTC-USD ) withdrawals from its platform in less than 24 hours, as the token's blockchain suffered from congestion, it said Sunday in a series of Twitter posts. The withdrawal issues weighed on the broader crypto market, with bitcoin ( BTC-USD ) sliding 3.9% to $27.87K as of shortly before 8:45 a.m. ET, and ethereum ( ETH-USD ) dipping 2.7% to $1.86K. The crypto behemoth noted that higher fees have been applied to pending transactions "so that they get picked up by mining pools," Binance tweeted. Both suspensions -- one on Sunday and the other on Monday morning -- lasted less than 90 minutes. "To prevent a similar recurrence in the future, our fees have been adjusted. We will continue to monitor on-chain activity and adjust accordingly if needed," it said . "Our team has also been working on enabling BTC Lightning Network withdrawals, which will help in such situations." Mining pools consist of a group of miners who combine their computational resources to mine blocks together for a better chance to receive rewards. The Lightning Network is bitcoin's ( BTC-USD ) layer 2 protocol that was designed to scale the token by making BTC payments faster and cheaper than processing a transaction directly on the blockchain. More on Binance Binance and CEO Changpeng Zhao sued by CFTC over regulatory breaches (update) Binance: Could CFTC Lead To Bigger Problems? Binance Australia gets OK for cancellation of its derivatives license Crypto exchange Binance suffers $2B in outflows as woes pile up - report
