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It is reported that Binance is blaming a "stuck transaction causing a backlog" as the reason it prevented people withdrawing their bitcoin for some hours on the 13th June 2022. I do not have much of a feeling of exactly what that means, looking at questions here it seems to be something that happens and it seems to be a technical issue, usually between screen and keyboard.

Is it actually credible that this sort of technical issue could bring the worlds largest centralised exchange to a halt for hours?

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In the questions you linked, the phrase "stuck transaction" is one typically used by people who are unaware of the effect of chosen transaction fee on confirmation time.

As we all know, this sort of "stuck transaction" cannot delay other people's transactions.


According to a Coindesk article

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance explained what caused the temporary withdrawal issues involving bitcoin on Monday in a series of tweets, saying they stemmed from repairs it was doing to address small hardware failures.

  • Binance wrote that it was “repairing several minor hardware failures on wallet consolidation nodes earlier today, which caused the earlier transactions that were pending to be broadcast to the network after the nodes were repaired.”

  • The company said that “these pending consolidation transactions had a low gas fee, which resulted in the later withdrawal transactions – which were pointing to the pending consolidation UTXO - getting stuck and not able to be processed successfully.” (UTXO refers to unspent transaction output.)

  • In order to fix these issues, Binance said it had to “change the logic to only take successful UTXO from consolidation transactions or successful withdrawal transactions. This fix will also prevent the same issue from happening again.”


So essentially, the problem was inside Binance. Some combination of hardware issue and bugs in their internal software. The transactions they constructed to carry out customer's requests were dependent on a consolidation transaction that had been affected by repairs to hardware failures.

The reference to "gas fees" seems a bit odd to me, they probably mean low transaction fees. However I believe it is clear the problem was not simply the same type of "stuck transaction" typically referred to by casual Bitcoin users. It was not simply an external issue of Bitcoin blockchain congestion or fee escalation. The fault lay wholly inside Binance.

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  • It can delay other transactions if those transactions are relying on the output of the "stuck" one, no?
    – user253751
    Jun 15, 2022 at 16:33
  • In normal circumstances those other transactions can try and use Parent Pays For Child to essentially "unstuck" the low fee transactions. In this case it seems Binance's internal systems for how they consolidate funds between their various wallets prior to conducting customer transactions broke down. As @RedGrittyBrick pointed out it was a purely internal Binance issue not a Bitcoin issue. Mar 7 at 8:02

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