This, it claims, was required for its preparations for Ethereum Merge
Binance announced that it has temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals for ETH and ERC-20 tokens due to the Bellatrix consensus layer upgrade. It says it will provide updates once deposits and withdrawals resume.
According to sassal.eth, the Bellatrix upgrade has finalized: “The Bellatrix upgrade just went live on the Ethereum Beacon Chain. Next up is the mainnet merge, which will happen in less than 9 days. The Merge is coming.”
At the time of publication, Binance has not yet indicated whether deposits and withdrawals have resumed on the platform.
Aside from this current halt, Binance earlier announced that ETH and ERC-20 token deposits and withdrawals on Binance will also be momentarily halted at 12:00 a.m. UTC on Sept. 15 for the Paris upgrade. Additionally, Binance said that it will temporarily suspend BETH deposits and withdrawals starting at 12:00 p.m. UTC on Sept. 14, 2022, and ending at 12:00 p.m. UTC on Sept. 16, 2022.
It added that “ETH 2.0” staking on Binance will continue even after the proof-of-stake transition. However, until Ethereum Shanghai upgrades in a few months, the functionality for withdrawal and redemption of staked ETH will not be available.
This, it claims, was required for its preparations for the Ethereum Merge, scheduled for mid-September. “Ahead of any possible ramifications from this event, Binance is taking steps to reduce trading risks and to keep user funds SAFU,” it stated in a tweet.
Merge two scenarios
Binance proposed two possible scenarios after the merge and its backup plans. Firstly, the exchange says that it will quickly resume ETH and ERC-20 token deposits and withdrawals if there is no fork and no new tokens are created.
The second scenario is if an ETH fork produces two chains that compete with one another and a new token. The ETH ticker will serve as a marker for the Ethereum PoS chain. Then users will be credited with the forked token based on the snapshot of their ETH balances.
Expectations remain after the successful completion of the Bellatrix upgrade, which will trigger a merge mainnet update.
