UNI jumps 15% after OKEx suspends withdrawals due to police investigation

Cryptocurrency exchange OKEx has suspended withdrawals from its platform indefinitely, as one of its multisig key holders has been held in police custody.

The news about hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies being trapped on the exchange shaved off around 3 percent off of Bitcoin's price but sent UNI, Uniswap's native token, up by almost 15 percent.

Missing key holder forces OKEx to suspend withdrawals "Indefinitely".

OKEx, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges on the market, has announced that it will be suspending cryptocurrency withdrawals from its platform "Indefinitely." According to the company's announcement, one of the private key holders of the exchange is currently "Cooperating with a public security bureau" in an investigation and has been out of touch with the exchange.

With the key holder being "Out of touch," the exchange was prevented from completing the withdrawal authorization earlier this morning and decided to suspend all withdrawals to protect the interest of its customers.

Other functions of the exchange, as noted in the announcement, remain normal and stable.

Jay Hao, the CEO of OKEx, confirmed on Twitter that fiat withdrawals from the exchange are unaffected by the suspension.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and CEO of Alameda Research, commented that exchange as big as OKEx would have announced that it was going through a period of "Optimization" if a single point of failure occurred in its multisig process to avoid tanking the markets.

While the exchange later noted that the investigation was made into the key holder's "Personal issue," most of the top-performing cryptocurrencies on the exchange quickly sold off following the news.

OKEx's announcement only seems to have exacerbated the schism between centralized and decentralized crypto services, with many pointing out failures like this will only serve to push more people into decentralized exchanges.