Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex announced today that beginning tomorrow, April 18, 2017, all incoming wires to Bitfinex will be blocked and refused by its Taiwanese banks.
This applies to all fiat currencies at the present time.
Accordingly, the exchange asked customers to avoid sending incoming wires to the company until further notice, effective immediately.
The announcement follows up last week’s announcement concerning USD withdrawal delays starting on April 13, 2017.
The Bitfinex team said:
“We continue to work on alternative solutions for customers that wish to either deposit or withdraw in fiat, and are making progress in this regard. We will continue to update our customers as to and when we have more information to share.”
Online derivatives exchange Deribit already announced the removal of Bitfinex price data from its index.
Also today, popular bitcoin derivatives exchange BitMEX announced the following, “…Bitfinex is no longer a viable USD/Bitcoin exchange, and we expect the pricing discrepancy between Bitfinex and other exchanges to increase as traders attempt to withdraw via cryptocurrencies. For this reason, we are weighting Bitfinex to 0 in the .BXBT Index, effective at 16:00 UTC today.”
Finally, in relation to this development, the largest derivatives exchange in the world CME Group announced that at 9:00 am London time on April 18th, 2017, Bitfinex will be removed from the list of Constituent Exchanges for the BRR and BRTI (bitcoin reference rate and spot index products). The exchange operator said that Bitfinex will be re-added once BRR and BRTI Constituent Exchanges Criteria are satisfied.