FUD Alert: Exchanges Disabling Monero May Not Mean Anything

The Monero community has been eagerly awaiting an explanation after a number of exchanges disabled the coin earlier today. John Foss’s weekly newsletter broke the news:

“Withdrawals and deposits have recently been disabled for apparent maintenance at a number of exchanges including Bittrex, Poloniex, Cryptopia, and XMR.to … Monero developers are yet to provide a possible reason for this.”

Cryptopia claims that they have put their Monero wallet in maintenance “at the request of the Coin Developer.” Bittrex has reportedly done the same, and has stated on Slack that they “are awaiting more info from the dev team.”

Developers Deny Involvement

These comments imply that the Monero developers know something about the exchanges’ actions, but this does not seem to be the case.

Monero developers have stated in chat rooms that the outages are “not due to a bug/issue… at least not one known by anyone here.” They have also noted that the recent multiple counting bug was fixed some time ago and is not the issue.

The developers additionally observed that many large exchanges, including Kraken, Binance, Bithumb, and HitBTC have not disabled Monero. As such, a few exchanges may have simply made inaccurate statements about their own actions. The fear, uncertainty, and doubt that has resulted may be inadvertent.

Suggested Reading : Learn more about many of the above exchanges here.

Plenty of Speculation

With no clear explanation, the Monero community has begun to speculate on the cause of the outages.

One Reddit user claims that a concept for a Monero attack was posted last week. This attack supposedly involved “a way to send exchanges unspendable Monero” that does not “actually gain the attacker anything, and merely spites the exchange.”

The user has not proven that this post exists, but it is possible that such a rumor has led exchanges to disable Monero — albeit not at the request of the developers.

Some users note that other Cryptonote-based coins have also been disabled. It is possible that there is a known issue with those coins, and Monero may have been grouped with those coins even if the bug does not affect it.

Others have speculated that exchanges are undergoing maintenance in preparation for Monero’s upcoming hard fork. However, this is scheduled for October 18th, which is quite far into the future.

Although it seems likely that there is no actual bug in Monero, the community is urging the team to respond to Bittrex and other exchanges. Although there may not be a bug, Monero’s place on exchanges is still a vital matter.

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