Data provided exclusively to Cointelegraph by blockchain and crypto analytics firm Flipside Crypto shows that Binance and OKEx paid big fees for Ether (ETH) withdrawals when the Bitcoin price crashed to $3,600 on March xiii, a day dubbed as "Black Thursday" among investors in the cryptocurrency market.

At the fourth dimension, the Bitcoin (BTC) toll dropped by around 50 pct in a single twenty-four hours, causing the cost of Ether to plunge to every bit depression equally $85 across major exchanges.

As an unprecedented cascade of liquidations pushed the entire market place downward in a short period of time, requests for withdrawals on exchanges also surged as investors began to demonstrate a high level of fear.

Among all the panic, Binance and OKEx, ii of the largest crypto exchanges paid, higher than the average price of "gas"—a term used to describe fees paid on the Ethereum blockchain network to transfer data or payments—to seamlessly process user withdrawals.

Covering gas fees supports Binance and OKEx's "user first" philosophy

Every bit shown in the Flipside Crypto nautical chart exclusively shared with Cointelegrah, the amount of gas paid on the Ethereum network past Binance, Coinbase, OKEx, Kucoin, and Kraken indicates that Binance and OKEx paid upwardly to 400 percentage college fees to ensure withdrawal transactions are included in the following cake.

Gas fees paid on Ether withdrawals past top exchanges. Source: Flipside Crypto

Flipside Crypto CEO Dave Balter told Cointelegraph:

"Binance and OKEx appear to be paying a constant charge per unit significantly above the prevailing market price, every bit evidenced past the yellowish and red parallel lines on the graph. This ensures that their transactions take the best risk of being included in the next cake. When the cost of gas spiked, around 8AM UTC on March 12th, they both had to compute a new threshold for their transactions to go through."

Almost exchanges take a stock-still fee rate for trading, deposits, and withdrawals. Since a meaning spike in on-chain activity on major blockchain networks like Ethereum and Bitcoin rarely occurs, exchanges typically maintain a stable withdrawal cost over a prolonged period of fourth dimension.

As an instance, on Binance, the standard fee for Ether withdrawals is 0.003 ETH, which is equivalent to around $0.57.

Apart from blockchain network fees, withdrawal fees on exchanges as well cover a diversity of operations on the substitution side such every bit costs involved in security, maintenance, and automated audits.

When an exchange pays an unusually high fee to process a withdrawal, it decreases the corporeality of revenue the substitution obtains from it to finance all of its other operations that are needed to settle withdrawal requests.

Non every crypto exchange paid the way for users

Coinbase and Kraken, however, appeared to exist actively predicting gas costs in real fourth dimension and adjusting fees based on changes of user activeness on the Ethereum network.

According to Flipside Crypto data scientist Will Toll, this may have led users to wait a few blocks until their withdrawals were fully candy, potentially causing some delay. Cost said:

"Coinbase and Kraken appear to be continuously monitoring the network and updating their gas prices accordingly, as seen in the blueish and pink lines on our graph. If these predictions turn out to be inaccurate, then users may take to wait a few actress blocks for their transactions to be processed. These few actress seconds could make a big divergence for users attempting to arbitrage prices across exchanges."

Whether exchanges would take to pay high fees following the launch of ETH ii.0 and the predictable transition from the proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm remains to be seen.

Upon the shift, fees on the Ethereum network are expected to drib substantially from current levels. This ways the next fourth dimension congestion builds upward on the network, exchanges may not have to cover the fees on behalf of their users.