Bittrex to go offline for scheduled maintenance.

The community suspects that the exchange has been hacked.

The cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex has announced scheduled maintenance today, December 5 from 19:00 to 22:00 (GMT). During the maintenance, users won't be able to log in to the system. API interfaces will be also unavailable. All trading operations will be halted.

Meanwhile, on December 4, someone transferred 43,500 BTC ($313 million) to a recently created wallet. Later during the day, Whale alert service registered another series of high profile transactions from the exchange to unknown wallets. All-in-all the service registered 16 transactions.

Users suspected that the exchange was hacked. The scheduled maintenance only heightened suspicion. However, the Bittrex team assures that "those allegations are false."

Also, on Wednesday. someone transferred over 70 million USDT to OKEx, causing a strong rally on the market. This move was considered as a trigger to Bitcoin's pump that pushed the price of the first digital coin above $7,700.

Notably, hackers stole $48 million in ETH and BTC from the South Korean bitcoin exchange Upbit. This was the eighth such incident in the industry this year, losses from the previous seven episodes exceeded $ 100 million.

