Bitkub, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Thailand, has temporarily suspended its services on the desktop platform on Tuesday after receiving a notice from the country’s financial regulator to fix the frequent outage issues, Bangkok Post reported.
Additionally, trading services on Bitkub’s mobile platform was unavailable for 16 hours before it went online again.
Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) oversees the digital currency exchanges operating in the country through its licensing scheme.
It slapped a notice on the leading local crypto exchange as it faced three outages only in January with the skyrocketing demand for cryptocurrencies.
Exchanges Struggling to Handle the Volume
Bitkub is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the country, handling over 90 percent of activity. The daily trading volume on the exchange spiked 1 to 2 billion baht from the previous 200 to 300 million baht levels.
According to a cited anonymous source, the exchange has around 300,000 to 400,000 client accounts, much less than the official reported number. This means a majority of Bitkub clients are yet to complete their account verification, the report outlined.
The notice from the market watchdog wanted the crypto exchange to fix all the issues within 5 days.
It ordered the exchange to modify trading and KYC systems to handle the traffic surge, a revision of the customer acceptance policy, modification of the business community plans in case of a trading system failure and improvement of the work mechanics of the trading system.
But, the abrupt shut down of the exchange’s services on Tuesday has alarmed its clients. Many are floating the theory that they might end up losing their deposits.
The worries are justified given the advance notification by the exchange for any scheduled maintenance sessions, which are expected to hamper the normal services.
This disruption might benefit other local competitors of Bitkub that might see a migration of existing Bitkub clients. Other prominent Thai crypto exchanges are SatangPro and Zipmex, but their offerings are not par with Bitkub. Though Binance offers services with Thai baht, it is only limited to its peer-to-peer platform.
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