My farewell with Binance
It has been a while since the last time I posted something. I guess I have been quite disappointed with Binance, and since then I have been busy sorting out my portfolio.
I started using Binance in August 2020, having migrated from Independent Reserve. I like the platform for many reasons, it can be summarised as below:
· Low fees
· has a lot of Cryptocurrencies listed, at least all the one that I would like to trade, over 500.
· low downtime
· outages/upgrades are notified few days in advance most of the time
· fair rates, I think the rates here are better than some of the other exchanges
· high APY for staking
Overall, it has been very convenient to use.
So what happened?
For anyone that is in the world of crypto, May 2021 was somewhat unforgettable when BTC plunges more than 30% in a single day or down to around 30k. Lots of liquidations, debates, noises happened around the crash, mid-May. Following the plunges of BTC down to 30k, the next day I went to deposit money into Binance, and I got the following error:
Up to this point, I still think that all the exchanges are congested due to the number of people trading, short/long whatever. I was getting the same error after 1 week, then 2 weeks.
I could not get a hold of anyone in live chat support, I was getting responses from a Bot, it was automatic messages. Someone did eventually got back to me and advised me to use other methods of payment to deposit money into my account, and marked the issue resolved. (btw in Australia, you can only deposit using payID, when I tried purchasing crypto with my debit card, it also didn’t work)
This drags on for about 2 months. Right before I decided to move out of Binance, I was posting on Twitter, tagging in the CEO for help, I also posted directly on his page, hoping to hear back from one of his teams (nice try). I guess the power of Social Media didn’t do me justice this time around.
Finally, I got a hold of proper support, and they couldn’t tell me why my access has been restricted. The deposit function will be blocked permanently on my account and there is literally nothing I can do about it. I asked if I created a new account, will this work? He said no because my account will be linked to my IDs and it will get flagged in the system.
I feel upset not because the account was blocked, I was more upset over the support level I received from the team, not only they couldn’t provide a valid reason why the account is blocked, but it took me months to get a hold of someone. There was no contact number for me to call and chat about this. While I had everything in Binance, it took a bit of an effort to move everything into my personal wallet.
Not only that I had to look into different methods to stake my coins. Luckily I didn’t lose anything throughout this process.
This is my personal experience, and it is probably pure bad luck, but I hope no one else has to go through what I did. I guess it is true that you shouldn't leave everything in the exchange.
My keys takeaways from this would be:
- Scatter out your portfolio, store your eggs in different baskets so if there are issues with one, you would still have your backup
- There is very little Support could do for you, especially if you have misplaced your seed phrases or misplaced your transaction between wallets
- Just because an exchange is big, does not mean you are covered.
- Have options for trading, don’t rely on just one (like I did) SMH. :(
