Binance Announces Post-Shapella ETH Withdrawal Requests May Take Weeks

On Thursday, April 13th, cryptocurrency exchange Binance disclosed that Ethereum withdrawal requests might take a few weeks to be processed. This announcement comes just a day after the Shapella upgrade went live on the Ethereum mainnet.

Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade – one of the most anticipated events in the crypto space for 2023 – now enables ETH validators to withdraw their locked funds. However, Binance stated its need to set a daily redemption quota for each user due to the Ethereum network’s processing limitations.

ETH Withdrawal Might Take 15 Days On Binance

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, announced on its website that its users will be able to redeem their locked ETH funds beginning April 19th. In the Thursday announcement, the company also disclosed that unstaking requests may take 15 days to several weeks to be completed.

According to the post, the amount of time it takes to complete an ETH unstaking request is determined by the total amount of ETH withdrawal requests by staking participants and the Ethereum network. As earlier noted, the processing limitations of the Ethereum blockchain played a major role in Binance’s ETH redemption structure and timeline.

Furthermore, Binance clarified that BETH (Binance’s tokenized version of staked ETH) tokens locked in pending withdrawal requests would not accrue any ETH 2.0 staking rewards. And users cannot cancel their withdrawal requests once submitted.

According to data from rated.network, there are currently over 400,000 partial withdrawal requests and nearly 30,000 full withdrawal requests. It is worth noting, however, that a large portion of these withdrawals are forced, as US-based crypto exchange Kraken had to discontinue its staking service following a $30 million settlement with the SEC.

ETH Rallies An Impressive 10.2% Since Shapella

On Wednesday, April 12th, at exactly 10:27 p.m. (UTC), the highly-anticipated Shapella upgrade launched on the Ethereum mainnet. The hard fork consists of modifications to the execution layer (Shanghai) and the consensus layer (Capella) of the network. But, most importantly, it enabled ETH validators to withdraw their staked funds from the network.

In anticipation of the upgrade, there was fear that the value of Ethereum would plummet due to the new ability of validators to liquidate their staked ETH. However, contrary to general perception, CryptoQuant predicted that the bearish pull would be minimal following the upgrade. And that has largely been the case since Shapella went live on Wednesday.

In fact, ETH climbed above $2,000 on the 13th of April, touching the $2,100 price level a couple of times since then. As of this writing, ETH trades at $2,090, rallying over 10% in the past three days. 

ETH trading at $2087.7 | Source: ETHUSD chart on TradingView

Featured image from Binance.com, chart from TradingView