​Binance suspends deposits in USDT and USDC on the Solana blockchain

What’s new? Two cryptocurrency exchanges announced the implementation of restrictions on USD Coin (USDC) and Tether (USDT) stablecoins on the Solana blockchain. Binance has suspended accepting deposits starting November 17, and OKX has announced the delisting of both stablecoins.

Announcement on the Binance blog

Announcement on the OKX blog

What else is known? The Binance team did not indicate the reasons for the suspension of deposits and said it would provide details in further announcements. OKX has indicated that it will stop supporting USDT and USDC deposits and withdrawals on the Solana network after delisting. The exchange also did not disclose the reasons for such a decision.

The Solana blockchain was launched in 2018, it uses the Proof-of-History consensus algorithm, which eliminates the scalability problem while maintaining a high level of security and decentralization.

How has Solana’s price reacted? The native token SOL has fallen in price by 5,69% over the past 24 hours. As of November 17, 13:25 UTC, the asset is trading at $13,25 (Binance’s data). Also, a significant decline in the rate occurred on November 9, the token showed a drop of 42,25%, to $12,37, amid rumors of a dump of the asset by the trading company Alameda Research, which is one of the largest investors in the project. SOL was also the second-largest asset in its capital. Alameda, along with the FTX exchange and 130 other companies is part of the FTX Group, the entire group filed for bankruptcy on November 11.

As of November 6, when FTX stopped processing withdrawal requests, the Solana Foundation had about $1 million in fiat and cash equivalents stored on the exchange. That amount represents less than 1% of the organization’s assets, so the impact of FTX’s collapse on Solana is negligible, the team noted at the time.

On November 2, Hetzner, a German cloud hosting company, restricted access to servers with Solana blockchain nodes. More than 20% of nodes by the volume of coins in staking lost access to the network.

In June and October, the Solana network temporarily suspended operation due to failures in the validation system.