Cryptocurrency exchange, OKEx announced today that the company cooperated with authorities throughout the investigation and no illegal activity was found in operations. Therefore, the exchange will resume unrestricted withdrawals on or before 27 November.
OKEx first restricted all withdrawals on 16 October after losing touch with one of its private key holders. The company explained that the private key holder was cooperating with relevant authorities for the required investigation.
The exchange confirmed today that the private key holder has returned to his normal business function, indicating that everything has settled down now. OKEx mentioned that the exchange has maintained 100% reserves for user funds, and they can withdraw anytime without any restriction.
OKEx outlined that prior to withdrawals, the security team will conduct strict checks to resume operations of the hot wallet system. The exchange will be launching several loyalty campaigns in the coming days to express deep apologies.
“OKEx has many years of experience safely operating digital wallets, assets, and transactions with no major security incidents. We maintain our commitment to ensuring that OKEx will always be a transparent and credible blockchain services company,” the official announcement mentioned.
Suspension Issue
The exchange provided details about the incident and explained the reasons behind the withdrawal suspension. The main reason was that the private key holder became unreachable and that is why it could not authorize the transactions. “The reason for the suspension of withdrawals in this specific incident was because a private key holder was not able to authorize transactions. OKEx has always used a backup mechanism for private key holders to ensure that each private key holder can trigger the activation of the backup private key in the event of long-term incapacitation, such as death or memory loss. However, we, unfortunately, failed to include other specific scenarios, such as private key holders becoming unreachable due to unforeseen circumstances in our contingency plan. In this specific incident, the ultimate resolution for the private key holder’s short-term incapacitation was not a technical one,” OKEx added.
