On July 3, 2018, Binance suspended all trading and withdrawal services due to "irregular" Syscoin (SYS) trades carried out "from a number of API users." The exchange has since resumed all activities, according to a blog post.
[1][2][3]
Questions remain, however, as to the root cause of the problem.
Binance API
While the price of Syscoin had hovered around 0.00004 BTC, an order for 1 SYS in exchange for 96 BTC was placed and completed on Binance. This trade sent the market into overdrive as users assumed that the exchange or the Syscoin protocol had been compromised.
Binance said it was revoking "existing API keys" and asked users to recreate their keys and be more protective. The exchange also informed users that it was rolling back irregular trades[4] and will create a "Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU)" which will be funded by 10 percent of all trading fees "to offer protection to our users and their funds in extreme cases."
After performing system upgrades, Binance announced that it had resumed normal operations at 8:00 a.m. UTC on July 4, 2018.
For its part, Syscoin, a bitcoin fork, tweeted[5] an update, insisting that the protocol was not compromised. Notwithstanding the "odd trading behavior" and an "atypical blockchain activity," their developers found nothing wrong with the blockchain.
Syscoin Miners
Syscoin Co-founder Sebastien DiMichele told Bitcoin Magazine about a mandatory upgrade to the Syscoin protocol (3.0.6.0[6]) released 10 days prior. This was due to the buggy[7] nature of the previous protocol. "The superblock implementation had bugs that affected transaction validation," DiMichele said.
DiMichele recounted how the team discovered the irregular trades on July 3. He said his team
