Changpeng Zhao (“CZ”), the CEO at Binance, the world’s largest cryptoasset exchange in terms of daily trading volume, recently noted via Twitter that “volatility” in the digital currency market is “finally” headed “in the right direction.”
Finally, wish came true, volatility in the right direction.
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) January 7, 2019
Binance Is Prepared To Serve Customers As Bitfinex Goes Offline For Maintenance
Zhao’s comments came in response to the bitcoin (BTC) price surging about 5% ($300) to over the $4,000 mark in the past 24 hours according to CryptoCompare data. In addition to a significant increase in the bitcoin price, other major digital currencies were in the green as well.
Zhao, a Chinese-Canadian tech entrepreneur who previously served as chief technology officer at OKCoin and worked at Blockchain.com, welcomed the return of price volatility while also responding to user concerns regarding Bitfinex’s scheduled maintenance-related downtime. According to a tweet from Bitfinex’s official Twitter account, the British Virgin Islands-registered firm’s trading platform “will be offline” on January 7th, 2019 for “three to seven hours.”
Bitfinex Preparing To Upgrade To “Bear-Metal Servers” To Enhance “Security” And “Performance”
Bitfinex’s management team explained that the exchange company is in the process of “completing the final stage of [its] data migration to dedicated bare-metal servers, in a move designed to significantly enhance platform speed, security and performance.” Notably, the last time Bitfinex went offline for maintenance work, there had been extreme volatility in cryptocurrency prices.
As CryptoGlobe reported in December 2018, Binance co-founder Zhao had said: “2018 has been a tough year in terms of the pricing for cryptocurrency, and I think we see a lot of projects not making it this year. So, it’s a correction year. But the technology was there, and we want to kick off 2019 with a bang.”
Moving Forward With Development & Expansion Plans, Even During Bear Market
In order to increase awareness about blockchain technology and cryptoassets, Zhao mentioned that the Malta-based exchange would be hosting the Binance Blockchain Week, which will be held in Singapore (between January 19th-22nd). Expressing his optimistic views about the emerging digital asset industry, Zhao had stated last year:
So, I think the people in the industry are still very confident about the future. So, there's no worries about that.
When asked how willing Binance was to expand its operations during a bear market, Zhao had said:
Our strategy has not changed [because of the bear market]. We've launched one fiat exchange [in 2018] … we still want to build 10 more fiat exchanges, and we are also launching our decentralized exchange, which is a very core blockchain technology based exchange. That will also allow much more freedom. None of our plans have changed. We're still pushing forward very aggressively.
