Poloniex Crashing? $67,877+ in Unconfirmed Steem + SBD Deposits!
Yesterday Poloniex reopened Steem and SBD transfers. 24 hours later Poloniex disabled Steem and SBD deposits and withdrawals again with a minimum estimated amount of $67,877 in unconfirmed deposits created within the last 18 hours alone. I sent 20 SBD yesterday to see if Poloniex was working and 18 hours later no reference to any deposit in my account. Meanwhile, I made and withdrew a deposit out of Bittrex within 20 minutes cashing out of SBD into LTC which I then cashed to USD in Coinbase.
To calculate how many deposits are not confirmed I visited the Poloniex wallet at https://steemit.com/@poloniex/transfers and made an Excel Spreadsheet totaling all the deposits after mine. The totals are
- 26,802 Steem from 45 deposits made after mine times $1.78 Steem price equals $46,099.
- 14,142 SBD from 148 Steem Dollar deposits made after mine times $1.54 Bittrex SBD price equals $21,779.
- $67,877 total USD value today of deposits made after mine most of which are likely not available for trading on Poloniex.
Edit 48 hours later
My SBD in Poloniex were credited about two days after my initial deposit and sold successfully to Bitcoin at nearly half of what the price was when I made the deposit. Poloniex hopes to reenable Steem and SBD deposits on July 1, 2017. That said, all of the other challenges with Poloniex remain and it will be interesting to see if they evolve or perish among their rapid growth!
Resume original post
You can do your own calculations by finding my transaction and visiting the Poloniex Steemit account at https://steemit.com/@poloniex/transfers. Note that this only counts deposits made after mine meaning the actual number might be much higher if the delay goes back further. Additionally, to save time I deleted many of the smaller transactions for under 5 Steem and under 5 SBD which means the actual numbers are probably higher still. That said, Poloniex might have manually approved a few of the largest individual Steem and SBD transactions faster meaning the real amount could be lower.
Is Poloniex near the breaking point?
With what appears to be thousands of customer complains piling up, incredible lag in the interface, verification requests pending for weeks, and what we have seen recently with the STEEM and SBD deposits being disabled, it appears Poloniex may be heading for at least a temporary crash or extended period of offline maintenance because they are overwhelmed to the point of near inability to function.
As many of us can relate to in our personal lives, getting into a situation where we are so overburdened that we can barely keep up with daily life allows almost any trivial event to break us down completely. How many of the disasters in our lives would have been totally avoided or easy to deal with at the time if we were at full health and able to handle the basics? A straw only breaks the camel's back if it has been ridden hard for a long time beforehand.
Poloniex appears to be near a breakdown which could be a good thing overall if they made some positive changes or could provide a disaster in the markets. While Steem is not even one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies traded on Poloniex, see how much their account is worth.
The Poloniex Steemit account at https://steemit.com/@poloniex/ is worth over $52 million dollars today. Over $438,926,155 in cryptocurrencies were traded on Poloniex within the last 24 hours accounting for about 10% of the tracked volume on all exchanges of $4,478,110,003.
Stories from customers are already all over Steemit about Poloniex deposits and withdrawals not going through for months now. Either Poloniex is going to get things together or a straw is going to come along that will break their back causing a temporary or perhaps permanent disaster.
I personally am very grateful for all of the tens of thousands of dollars of trades I have made using Poloniex and the hundreds of thousands of views on my tutorials on YouTube featuring Poloniex. I even made an online course or two just about Poloniex.
When we love someone, I think we also have a duty to be honest and share the truth we see when it hurts. The truth I see is that cryptocurrency trading has grown so fast that Poloniex is on the verge of collapse under the weight of the massive volume of transactions they are processing and requiring too many manual approvals for deposits and withdrawals instead of automation.
After almost a year of using Poloniex, I trade on Bittrex now and will not go back to Poloniex until I see a huge improvement and them honestly sharing about what they are doing to fix their now massive list of customer complaints and problems.
Thank you for reading this and I hope it has been helpful!
If you would like me to keep writing most posts like this, would you please upvote it because that will help me know to keep doing more!
Love,
Jerry Banfield
Hi Jerry,
I had a discussion with someone else about this before, and this is what I mentioned.
I had a think about what the issue is at Poloniex and it frightens me to think if I was correct, how deep the ramifications are.
My theory (which is just a guess)
Poloniex experienced a catestrophic loss of funds. This could either be through security issues or interal siphoning of funds - theft / embezzlement etc. Either way, the exchange is insolvent.
The exchange attempts to create a mania phase encouraging people to deposit anything and everything and then market making themselves with substantial volume that cannot be proven to be legitimate.
Highly inflated coins gives rise to many users with inflated portfolios, except, anyone who likely has a win from participating in these manipulated markets will find it troublesome to withdraw. At first, a few who made large wins will not be able to withdraw, then as more and more people report withdrawal issues, a systematic lockdown of funds will occur.
The mania phase results in large deposits which then can no longer be withdrawn. This gradually fills the 'hole' which the exchange created by market making each of their markets, and most likely front running a lot of the 'pump' with money not belonging to them ( probably from the capital base of the users )
Effectively, the inflated price of the markets there, are only held up by the fact that fewer people can actually 'realise' profit because it's not BTC when it's just a number on the exchange. It's BTC when you can withdraw it, and see it in your own wallet - an action which cannot be taken by an increasingly large base of users.
For me, I had a very substantial amount of money on Poloniex, none of which I have been able to withdraw since over a month ago. It has been complete silence from support despite multiple attempts to get any updates on why my withdrawals have remained in awaiting approval for over a month.
To answer your question in lamens terms :
Someone is willing to pay a premium over nominal market prices of SBD because it attracts people to deposit SBD to sell for BTC, but the BTC cannot be withdrawn. Poloniex could literally place orders at ridiculous prices with phantom btc.
I would be very surprised if I ever saw my money there again. I will assume it is lost and treat it as an expensive lesson.
As of right now, I will probably take advice from another friend on Steemit and avoid centralised exchanges altogether.
"avoid centralised exchanges altogether."
Luckily, we have BitShares for this!
Wise decision to avoid centralised exchanges... From a business point of view it is not acceptable that they do not communicate with their customers on such an important issue within 5 hours at least... But not getting any answers for a whole month???
Regarding your theory of luring in deposits by buying everything with phantom BTC's I think this strategy would not be realistic. I was wondering about the high SBD price as well... for months already... but the price is very high as well on the internal decentralized exchange. Like 1.80 USD for 1 SBD. How can that be?
Totaly agree with you man
Hi, if you are new to crypto i sincerely think you should use telegram
https://t.me/PumpsNotifier
they Provide Free Cryptocurrency Trading Signals for Pumps on a regular basis. just join group and follow and reap rewards for consistent profit
I had a hell of a time taking all of my STEEM off of Poloniex when I was buying my SP. Let me just put it that way. It took me weeks/months. I finished powering up around Febuary of this year I think.... had several withdrawals in limbo. So I am not surprised by all of this. Not sure what the reason is as other exchanges such as Bittrex do not have this issue.
Yeah, I've been using Bittrex for over a year now and have never had any problems with it. Would definitely recommend it to others.
They have $500 of my SBD and same with @matt-a --- Mine has been lost on a deposit to them over a week now.
It can be easily seen in my wallet or on SteemD.com etc
That was my money I won to go to SteemFest
@thejohalfiles thank you very much for your upvotes and sharing your experience with Poloniex here with us!
No worries at all
@sweetsssj thank you for sharing this because while I am not sure exactly what has specifically happened, what you have shared combined with what else I read leads me to believe they have picked up some shameful secret they are not telling us about and they are scrambling to keep everything going before it comes out! While they turned off the discussion due to "needing support elsewhere" one of the first steps when something bad happens is often to stop people from talking about it. Killing the chat box to me was an ominous sign that encouraged me to withdraw everything right away and I wish you luck in getting your withdrawal complete! I am very grateful today I was able to get mine off just before everything started getting crazy!
I'm so glad that you have protected yourself from this enormous counter-party risk before anything ominous really happens.
I'm not sure why it is that some people seem to have no problems withdrawing whilst an army of others have been having problems for months. Me being one of them.
I read The Willy Report some time a go which goes through all the events leading up to and after the demise of gox. It's eerie how similar poloniex's recent actions have played out.
When something is usually too good to be true, it usually is, and Poloniex have certainly created quite the lucrative market on their exchange perfectly conducive to luring in a very large and significant part of the crypto community. Whether or not it turns out as bad as mt gox, if bad at all, remains to be seen. But I certainly have my skin in the game. Nervous times for me!
Tonight I just got my SBD deposit into Poloniex, traded to Bitcoin, and then completed a withdrawal to Coinbase in about an hour which was surprising because I did not think it would work! For your deposits in limbo, did you ever get the emails asking to confirm withdrawal? I think my withdrawals say awaiting approval until I click the link in the email confirming I want to complete the withdrawal. Is there a way to resend the email or did you already go through all that and nothing worked?
I've been able to withdraw from Polo, but I'm withdrawing small amounts at a time (less than half a bitcoin).
I think they're manually approving large withdrawals, so do small withdrawals every day instead (it will cost you 10,000 satoshis in fees each time, but that's a pittance to pay to get your money out).
I've heard too that old accounts are having no problems with withdrawals but newer accounts afre struggling.
I can say the same thing. I made a withdrawal request but, first I had to verify my account.
Problem with the theory is that Poloniex is a US company. In the US how a catastrophic loss of funds works at a business is as follows:
The reason people in the US generally go that route is that if they did what you suggest, they would go to jail. To avoid jail time in the US, it's easier to just go bankrupt. The management and ownership can keep their big salaries and dividends and stay out of jail.
So it does happen in the US that businesses commit fraud, but really, these people never are thinking straight. It's simpler to go bankrupt which is basically like a gimme for a business. Sometimes they're allowed to restructure even. Sometimes if it was theft and they were insured, insurance could cover the loss.
exact same thing has happened to me their wallet was on maintenance they had temp disabled deposit/withdraw but then later or warning went away and they were accepting deposits on SBD so i went ahead an deposited by SBD to poloniex and boom they just like forgot about and and funny thing is they actually now have auto response to u saying wallet is under maintenance if it is then why have they allowed the deposit in first place?
secondly i can clearly see the transactions happening in their wallet both in and out and even some SBD were sent to others from poloniex so what is it? as far as i know if wallet is under maintenance it should not be used right?
i have a whole post written about it check it out if u can with pictures and stuff! thanks. goodluck to you and me both lol
https://steemit.com/poloniex/@shariqriaz/poloniex-is-lying-about-their-sbd-wallet-maintenance
Hi, if you are new to crypto i sincerely think you should use telegram
https://t.me/PumpsNotifier
they Provide Free Cryptocurrency Trading Signals for Pumps on a regular basis. just join group and follow and reap rewards for consistent profit
the only solution i could give for everyone who is willing to withdraw their money either SBD or Steem is to use Bittrex,
if people have Bittrex as a choice why they still putting their money in Poloneix, I have a friend who lost $3000 worth of SBD in Poloneix 3 months ago, and he still did not get any response from Poloneix support.
Be wise guys you still have a Bittrex as choice, I already told too many Steemians that I know to avoid Poloneix, until everything is back to normal.
problem with bittrex is their interface, it's just not as user friendly as POLO, thats why people stay on POLO, it's like you have 1 screen for trades and you switch between you currencies easily, whereas BITTREX it's just hard to keep an eye on movements without being on the home page not looking at charts.
this to me is bullshit.
I have at times up to 60 btc on polo, withdrawing daily around 10btc, no issues so far last months... do not understand why you think they would be insolvent. steem is not a very relevant currency in the total balance sheet of them anyway.
Alttrader you obviously suffer from selective reading. I have a fully verified level 2 account. I have had it for about a year. I have made withdrawal requests since May. None have gone through. Just stuck in awaiting approval. I have made support tickets to no avail.
Like I said. There are people who will withdraw fine. But a growing number of people can't . If you look at what happened in the last with gox and what happened leading up to them shutting down, it's no different. For me it might as well be as if they defaulted because I have never had to wait 45 days and counting for a custodian of my money to release it to me when I request it. Let alone fail to communicate to me in the slightest.
I use a bunch of exchanges. At no other exchange do I encounter withdrawal that is "temporarily disabled". It's bizarre and very recent. I'd been using Poloniex for eighteen months prior to to this happening in the past two months.
No exchange should limit you at all to how much of your money you want to withdraw! To me its bull shit one can only withdraw only 10 BTC and not an entire wallet to put into cold storage. That right there is red flags to me. Withdrawing entire balances on coinbase, kraken, or CEX.IO are never limited especially for crypto.
Very informative
Hi @sweetsssj
I still believe that you could get your money. There might just have been glitches that caused some transactions not working as normal. I love reading your travel posts so much. You are such a blessed person in this world.
Ronald Jay Rama @ronaldjayrama
hah you should write a Crypto Thriller novel about this :) It would be an exciting TV show to produce!
Openledger.io check it out ! so cool so many coins just neeeds more liquidity and users but its still possible to buy relatively small to medium amounts...bitshares tho its so cool! but Poloniex will be fine! They telepathically send me messages explaining whats going on..Oh whats that Poloniex? Oh theyre telling me...theyre saying they just have alot of technical errors in their wallet systems and its just alot of transactions and they cant REVEAL what technical difficulties they are experiencing because revealing that vulnerability will open them up to hackers and theft ... But Open ledger is sooo cool! u can use it to buy bitcoin using SBD or steem! U can even buy tether! It is a miracle and Bitshares is the best and problems like this will allow bitshares to become like steemit's little brother that becomes taller than steemit!
"Catastrophic loss of funds" - yikes! Please don't say stuff like this... or at least please don't let them be true... As someone who lost 110 LTC at Cryptsy (and probably one of the less affected) it's painful to think of another exchange going bust. It was even worse because immediately after reading this I withdrew about 1 BTC worth of MAID and the transaction failed and I thought I'd lost it. However a few hours after filing a support ticket the transaction was re-done and I got my MAID out. But for a minute there is scared me pretty good.
I honestly think their issues are just caused by scaling problems - even the biggest guys with nine-figure VC investment and billions on deposit have issues that are pissing their customers off (I won't name names but I'm sure you can guess).
I totally agree about decentralized exchanges - we so need them and we so need liquidity in them. I've used the one on the WAVES network and it was fine - good liquidity for the WAVES/BTC pair.
Very educating
I have had real problems with Poloniex and reported about it here in Steemit and Facebook. Nobody was really reacting to it. For me there is no question, the figures on your screen are only figures. These are typical habits of brokers, banks and exchanges, typical. I can explain it like this: When you pay funds into an insurance policy, that money is reinvested by the insurance company into other asset classes, you are left with a piece of paper with writing on it. What can protect you? Multiple accounts, multiple assets, focus on "physical". I have been a trader and investor for 30 years, you can't believe how many times I have been scammed... and lost and lost and lost and lost...
I don't like polo and liquidated yesterday, I had to do it in BTS, the transfer worked instantly, not sure if this info might help or not.
i also had trouble getting a reply from bittrex and am using changelly
Changelly has terrible exchange rates. How do you cope? I have always refused to work with Changelly because of this. Please comment buddy.
seems it is better to get a larger exchange charge and have it occur than be waiting weeks like people are on poloniex - i respect your opinion though you haven't said who you are using
I use all kinds of storage. Paper wallets, nodes, bitcoin.de, bittrex, poloniex, coinbase, kraken, etc.. I have never sold any crypto, only mine. I have always stumbled accross Changelly, but everytime I wanted to execute a transaction I got so pissed off, the BTC price etc. is so far off and unjustified that I started to coagulate. I mine Dash, XMR, ETH, SC, UBQ, BCN, ZEC. I don't trust anything I can't touch. Too many bad experiences good buddy.
looks like you know what your doing - i will keep an eye on your posts to see your advice too
Haa ha ha haaaa, no worries. You just made me feel like this:
awesome
Pretty happy I found Steemit recently, as it has opened my eyes to Poloniex. This is feeling more and more like Mt. Gox with each passing day. Maybe that isn't quite fair, as Mt. Gox truly was incompetent. Poloniex may be a case of biting off way more than they can chew. One possible vector not mentioned is that Poloniex is likely still filled with bugs across their expansive platform. Managing that many currencies, that many wallets is likely to be a monumental task. The slow response from support reported across many channels is not encouraging either. My personal issue is quite relevant and highlights one bug:
Recently I closed multiple margin positions. I shorted ETH, LTC, XRP, and DASH vs. BTC. After closing all of my positions, a few hours later Poloniex still thinks I have some position and is still calculating a borrowing cost after I have withdrawn all funds possible:
Total Margin Value 0.01475918 BTC
Unrealized P/L 0.00000000 BTC
Unrealized Lending Fees -0.00000004 BTC
Net Value 0.01475914 BTC
Total Borrowed Value 0.02176298 BTC
Mind you I have no positions open. The amount of "Total Borrowed Value" is the amount Poloniex believes I still hold a position for, yet I have no open positions, short or long. At this stage I am uncomfortable having any funds on Poloniex and likely won't be going through the grueling support process for the small sum currently stuck in margin-limbo.
I personally wouldnt be using margin or shorting any thing. Only because the crypto exchanges have so many bugs, they are not clear on rules, they have little to no obligation to you or any regulations that will keep them in check, so they do right for customers. This is possibly a disaster brewing to happen. Buy coins, invest for medium to long term. And keep those coins in cold storage were u control the keys.
Thanks for the information
Hi, if you are new to cryptocurrency i sincerely think you should use telegram
https://t.me/PumpsNotifier
they Provide Free Cryptocurrency Trading Signals for Pumps on a regular basis. just join group and follow and reap rewards for consistent profit
thanks for the informative write up about your experience
kindly cite examples of decentralized exchanges
bitshares !
That's right, the answer to all these problems is---bitshares! Everybody, all together now....bitshares and openledger!
Great analysis of Poloniex funds.I just want to add the they are holding 1,223,387 SBD - this is a HALF of all SBD.
Maybe people will begin to switch to Bitshares Exchange.
WOW
Poloniex is hold about half of all SBD???
What happens to SBD if Poloniex vanishes? Would SBD go up or down?
I was thinking about it too. It will damage STEEM directly.
Everything's Gonna Be Alright
Everything's Gonna Be Alright ...
Everything's Goona Be Alright :) I hope so
Hey Jerry,
I have had my share of problems on Poloniex from no return emails from the support and withdrawals that would error and I would never get refunded.
With my portfolio getting rather large I ended up pulling my coins off the exchange and putting them in individual wallets in which makes me feel a lot safer and comfortable with my investment in my hands rather then a possible Mount Poloniex. :) Thanks for the great post I'm sure it's getting a lot of folk on here to think about their individual investments as well.
I am withdrawing from Poloniex to my daily limits, daily. No issues; transfer is quick following the confirmation email.
Hey, I have an idea .. Stop using Poloniex!
Thats somewhat of a concern, thanks for the heads up.
Poloniex will be going back up according to them... lets all heavily scrutinize them but also be understanding and supportive if they are pushing to fix this all....
https://steemit.com/steem/@xiobus/quick-update-steeming-mad-at-poloniex-well-guess-what-has-been-announced
I stopped usinv Polonuex a while ago. I like and trust Bittrex.
Time for OpenLedger, maybe. If they could trigger some liquidity there it would be nice.
Agree. OpenLedgers low liquidity is major barrier for adoption. Only crisis on centralized exchanges will boost it.
i am starting to seriously consider switching permanently to openledger. for now, blocktrades has been perfect in his customer service so I am equivocal.
Blocktrades are conveeniant but too expensive. OpenLedger have too less liquidity and a lot of trading pares are useless. No real price discovery there. But your coins are safe on blockchain. They both need more users and traffic. I hope it'll come sooner than latter.
I use Openledger.io for everything I can
So sexy to hear a girl talk about Openledger.io like this!!!!
Wow I used it once to bu some zappl and I didnt know how many new coins have been added sice that sale!
wow they have everycoin poloniex has! ...almost!!! even tether!
How could anyone resist this beautiful GUI? so much better than poloniex, no centralized assholes to stop your withdrawals, noone person or private group is in control the way it should be ..like steemit ...and Bitshares is now the Exchange of steemit! imagi ne when we integrate it with chainBB!!!! imagine having our OpenBitcoin wallets available here on steemit.com like in the next hardffork Update! so cool to think of having an exchange with eevery coin poloniex has, but here on steemit! like in our internal steem to SBD market, i wnder if we can add bitcoin and ethereum LOL well mayne we can just use Openledger.io and link it the way they link Blocktrades.us from the new "Sell" button on the SBD button in the wallet! we should petition the developers to raise money to pay someone to add the openledger.io exchange to #chainBB we should ask @jesta is that is possible to embed an openldger.io window inside of beta.chainbb.com (steemit with enhanced features) to allow people to buy and sell their SBD and steem for bitcoin all on the same page! how cool would it be to send Bitcoin to people right from steemit.com!!!
Aaaaaand that's exactly why I a) pulled everything out of Poloniex and b) invested into BTS :)
That was my point. It's difficult these days to exchange sbd to bts.
i just take the hit and send it to blocktrades for immediate conversion from SBD to BTS
I did it twice, but then they went down. Now it's working again.
Take your coins offline into a portable SSD once you have a significant amount. Keep it plugged into the power outlet, but disconnect it from your PC. Encrypt the files for a extra layer of security. I'd steer clear of flash drives. I worked tech support and they'd normally die in 1-5 years. SSD can last 80. It will cost you some money to transfer the coins back onto an exchange to sell them, but you'll have nearly perfect security in the meantime.
this is not true. it is a commercial electronic device with solder joints etc. and the life expectancy is not 80 years. a MTBF (mean time before failure) calc for SSD is not 80 years.