OKEx Withdrawal Services Suspended as Founder Detained by Investigators

• OKEx Founder facing an investigation by Chinese police.
• Company suspended withdrawal facilities.
• Bitcoin dropped approx. 2.5% & OKEx token nosedived by 15%.

OKEx, one of the biggest Chinese crypto-focused exchanges, temporarily suspended its digital assets/cryptocurrencies withdrawal services following its founder’s news reportedly detained by the police.

After Binance and Huobi, OKEx is known as the third largest derivative trading platform and holding nearly US$5,247,325,375 in volume, according to the FTX volume monitor window.

The global crypto exchange declared that when the key holder can authorize the transaction, then the announcement of resumed services would be made public.

The keyholder (founder) of OKEx and previous CTO at Docin, Mingxing Xu aka “Star Xu” is under the investigation process from the past week and also seemed to be absent from the work, reports said.

As per the latest announcement on the OKEx website, “One of the private key holders is currently cooperating with a public security bureau in investigations where required. We have been out of touch with the concerned private key holder. As such, the associated authorization could not be completed. Pursuant to 8.1 Service Change and Interruption of the Terms of Service, OKEx may change the Service and/or may also interrupt, suspend, or terminate the service at any time with or without prior notice. To act in the best interests of customers and deliver exceptional longtime customer service, we have decided to suspend digital assets/cryptocurrencies withdrawals as of [October 16, 2020, at 11:00 (Hong Kong Time)].  We assure that OKEx’s other functions remain normal and stable, and the security of your assets at OKEx will not be affected.”

OKEx CEO Jay Hao while reasoning out on the suspension of crypto withdrawals, said on Weibo, it’s a matter of private key holder’s personal issue and assured the public on the company, operation, and business are not impacted. The decision was taken after considering the user’s safety and security that are uncompromisable to the company.

Following the event, OKEx denied to comment on the nature of Xu’s cooperation with the police authorities and revealed that OKEx is no longer affiliated with OK Group.

Further, the news upset the market sentiments and impacted Bitcoin which soon took a dip by 2.5%, on the other hand, OKB coin faced the saddest time and dripped by 15% simultaneously. As of press time, the Coingecko cryptocurrency price tracker shows Bitcoin and OKB are priced at $11,304.04 and $5.20, respectively.

On 28 Feb, OKEx met with the multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DSoS) attack in chorus with Bitfinex that disrupted the normal operations of the website. However, no user was impacted, according to the announcement by the company.