OKEx Exchange Did Not Have a Contingency Plan to Deal with Withdrawal Suspension

After such a long time of waiting, the OKEx exchange finally announced the resumption of the withdrawal services. It has been revealed how long it took for the exchange to re-instate its withdrawal services. In total, it took the exchange over six weeks to re-instate its withdrawal services for its users.

The OKEx exchange has revealed that it had expected to receive some very negative feedback throughout all this time from its users. It had also kept it into consideration that once the withdrawal services were re-instated, it will see the majority of the investors leaving the platform.

However, to the exchange’s surprise, the outcome was even less than half of what OKEx had expected. It has actually come as a huge relief for the investors/users that the exchange has been able to re-instate its services after 6 weeks.

Back on November 16, 2020, it was the CEO of OKEx ‘Jay Hao’ who took it to the Telegram platform to have a Q&A session with their users. It was expected that the CEO will use the platform to provide updates and more clarity on the withdrawal delay matter. But to the investors’ surprise, not much information was shared by the CEO of the exchange.

The majority of users and investors asked the same question to the OKEx CEO during the Telegram session. They wanted to know the reason that led to the exchange suspending its withdrawal services for an indefinite amount of time.

The users asked why the platform did not refer use the back private keys in order to keep the withdrawal services going. To which Hao replied that one of their private key holders was not able to authorize the transactions due to some reason.

Hao stated that their exchange’s backup mechanism is robust when it comes to private holders. The mechanism ensures that the verification process for the backup private keys gets triggered for particular cases. The cases that have been enlisted by the exchange include memory loss, long-term incapacitation, and death.

However, the backup private key authorization was put in place for the particular case where the private key holder was unreachable. This is the reason why the exchange had to suspend the withdrawal service until they are able to re-establish contact with the key holder.

It was later reported that the concerned private key holder that resulted in the authorization process being delayed was Mingxing ‘Star’ Xu. Mingxing Xu is the co-founder of the OKEx exchange. In addition to the unavailability of the private key holder, there were speculations around the access.

It was being expected that no one at the exchange had the privileges to make any changes if the holder would not have shown up.