The company stressed that its operations do not involve illegal activities. The miners of the OKEx pool withdrew due to the uncertainty.
The bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange OKEx announced that it will reactivate withdrawals from its platform today, November 27, or even earlier, according to a statement on its website. The exchange house indicated that there will be no restrictions on operations and that it will apply a reward plan to its users for loyalty.
OKEx suspended withdrawals from its system on October 16 after one of its executives, of unknown identity, suffered detain by law enforcement authorities to launch an investigation into the operations of the company. The freeze occurred because the manager is the owner of one of the private keys of the company.
“Throughout this investigation, OKEx confirmed not being involved in any suspicious or illegal activity, and the holder of the private key just now returned to his normal business functions,” OKEx reported without identifying the executive, which was suspected detained about a month ago.
Before what will be the reactivation of its service, OKEx said that it will conduct strict security controls to guarantee the operation of its hot wallet system. OKEx admitted that it has not included in its contingency plan scenarios, such as one of the private key holders “becoming unreachable due to unforeseen circumstances.”
OKEx Mining Pool Collapse
Due to the situation with the OKEx executive, the processing power or hashrate of its bitcoin mining pool suffered a fall down almost in its entirely, going from 9,000 PH / s to only 20 PH / s ina very short amount of time. The collapse of the group of miners relates to the arrest of the manager who has been identified as Mingxing “Star” Xu, founder of the OKEx exchange.
According to figures from btc.com, the pool remained operational, mining between 150 and 320 blocks per month until October 2020. However, statistics now show that during, November the group mined only 1 block, which represents a fall of almost 100%.
In the last month of operations, the pool only extracted 12 blocks, and the last one has a registration that dates on November 2. That is, the group has 17 continuous days without mining any blocks, according to The Block. An update on OKEx’s Twitter account, published on Tuesday, indicates that withdrawals remain under suspension.
Reports on the release of the executive
From China, local media and reporters covering the bitcoiner source published Thursday that “Star” Xu “gained some freedom”. Reporter @WuBlockchain reported on the release but did not clarify if it is a conditional release or if it is the end of the investigation.
“Star’ Xu, director of OKEx, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in China, gained some freedom. This may bring a bit of optimism in the research storm hitting the crypto industry in China, ”the communicator wrote on Twitter.
The information about the executive’s release sent the price of OKB, an ERC20 token on Ethereum that receives a back up by the exchange, skyrocketing. According to metrics from the Live Coin Watch service, the crypto asset shows a 15.2% rise in the last 24 hours trading at $ 5.69 per unit.
By: Jenson Nuñez.
