Upbit and Bithumb Freeze INJ Transfers After Second Halt in 10 Weeks

Korean Exchanges Suspend INJ Transfers

Bithumb suspended Injective (INJ) deposits and withdrawals from 23:00 KST on Monday, November 9, and Upbit froze both services the same day, after the Injective (INJ) mainnet halted block production for the second time in roughly ten weeks. The INJ price last stood near $8.10, up 12.74% for the week, market data shows, well above the roughly $4.85 level the token held during the August incident. Bithumb told its users the freeze was imposed because the network is no longer producing blocks, a condition that stops the chain's consensus mechanism from finalizing new blocks and leaves on-chain transfers in limbo. Spot trading for the token remains open during the pause, so Korean won and other books can still match orders, but staking and unstaking are suspended until the network stabilizes. The exchange said it would reopen transfers once the chain is stable and update its original notice at that point. Withdrawals requested before the deadline that had not yet settled will clear in sequence, while deposits submitted after the freeze took effect will be credited once service returns. Upbit's notice took effect from the moment of publication and sets no date for restoring the services. Binance has also locked Injective (INJ) withdrawals, alongside those of NEAR and LTC, though HYPE is no longer on that exchange's suspension list. Holders who move INJ between venues, or who route the token, the network's governance token, through staking, face the same predicament as in August: funds that stay stuck until the chain restarts block production. Injective has not yet said what caused this stoppage.

The August Halt and a $4.9 Million Exploit

The previous stoppage came on August 31, when the chain produced no blocks for roughly three hours and 42 minutes. In a statement posted on September 1, Injective said contributors had “coordinated an accelerated network upgrade that took longer than initially expected” and insisted that the blockchain and INJ “remained secure throughout.” Chief executive Eric Chen described the incident as an upgrade rather than a halt. Upbit was among the venues that paused Injective (INJ) transfers after that event, and its decision to cite a block production halt drew criticism from Injective, which preferred to frame the episode as an upgrade. The upgrade followed an exploit: Injective said the accelerated upgrade came after an attack on “a small number of ecosystem applications operating binary options markets,” while maintaining that it was not an exploit of Injective itself. On-chain researcher Paddy-earthling traced the attack to a market identifier collision in the core code. The attacker reused an INJ-denominated insurance fund that collided with a USDC binary-options market, executed self-matched trades between his own subaccounts and extracted roughly double the collateral he posted on each pass. He created 299 instant binary-options markets in roughly 19 hours, each connected to an oracle configured to never report a price, which forced the refund path the scheme abused. Researchers estimated that about $4.9 million was bridged to Ethereum and left in a single wallet, untouched since. Injective has not published a full postmortem; estimates of the loss have ranged between roughly $2.79 million and $6.5 million, and the foundation has named no figure of its own. Critics also pointed to the team pulling its core chain repositories from GitHub, arguing that hiding the source code did not stop the bug from being found.

A Halt Days After the Nasdaq Debut

The halt comes days after a milestone on Wall Street for the protocol. Canary Capital's staked INJ ETF started trading on Nasdaq under the INJC ticker on November 5, and Chen joined Canary CEO Steven McClurg in ringing the Nasdaq opening bell on November 6, a moment the protocol promoted as a move “from a dorm room in 2018” to “the center of Wall Street.” The fund reported $16.12 million in net assets after two sessions, while its share count stayed flat at 600,000, so the asset gain did not come from new subscriptions. Unlike in August, the protocol has offered no explanation for this stoppage, so holders have no stated basis for treating the outage as routine maintenance. Both exchanges tied the resumption of transfers to a stable chain, which makes the restart of block production the single condition that unfreezes INJ's exchange rails; until then, spot books can keep matching orders while on-chain balances stay put. Earlier in the week the token had rebounded 18% from a triple-tested trendline, a setup examined in INJ technical analysis.