On-chain investigator ZachXBT has put the centralized exchange AscendEX under public scrutiny, citing a wave of reports that user withdrawals are being delayed for days or weeks, or not processed at all, alongside on-chain observations he says point to possible liquidity trouble.
A community alert meets weeks of complaints
In a post on his Investigations Telegram channel, ZachXBT said he had observed multiple reports that AscendEX, formerly known as BitMax, was delaying or failing to process user withdrawals. He added that, having reviewed the exchange’s known hot wallets on analytics platforms Arkham and TRM, its reserves “appear to lack large cap tokens such as ETH, USDT, USDC, SOL,” which he said indicates the platform is “likely facing liquidity issues.”
The alert did not emerge in a vacuum. For weeks, users on public review platforms and forums have described withdrawals frozen in an “initiating” state with no transaction hash generated or requests marked rejected without explanation—in some accounts for well over a month, including from users who say they completed identity verification. Many describe support tickets met with a brief acknowledgment and then silence.
Separately, traders reported that certain markets on the platform, including gold-backed tokens, had gone inactive before withdrawals stalled. A user-run effort has begun compiling affected accounts, claiming a large pool of impacted users, though that tally is a community estimate and remains unverified.
AscendEX, founded in 2018 by George (Jing) Cao and Ariel Ling, is not new to disruption. In December 2021, the exchange was drained of roughly $78 million in a hack that some reports attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group—context ZachXBT noted in his post, though it predates the current situation by years.
What the on-chain picture shows, and what it doesn’t
ZachXBT’s core technical claim is that the exchange’s identifiable hot wallets do not hold the deep balances of major assets one would expect of a venue processing normal withdrawal volume. If accurate, that is a meaningful yellow flag: an exchange that cannot source large-cap tokens to fund redemptions is, at minimum, under operational strain.
It is important to be precise about the limits of that evidence, however. Hot wallets are only the working balances an exchange keeps online for day-to-day flows; the bulk of a well-run platform’s assets typically sit in cold storage, which is not always publicly identifiable.
The absence of large balances in known hot wallets is therefore a reason for concern and a prompt for answers — not, on its own, proof of insolvency. That distinction matters, and it is one ZachXBT’s own framing respects by describing the situation as “likely” liquidity issues rather than a confirmed shortfall.
For its part, AscendEX has not issued a public response to the insolvency concerns. The exchange’s help center carries a notice acknowledging deposit and withdrawal delays, and its standard disruption announcements have historically attributed such pauses to wallet upgrades and maintenance while stating that user account balances are not affected. The company separately suspended trading in two stablecoins in May after what it described as a hacking incident involving abnormal token minting. None of those notices directly addresses the scale of the current withdrawal complaints or the liquidity question ZachXBT raised.
A familiar pattern, and a warning for users
The episode follows a script the industry has seen before, in which withdrawal delays, unresponsive support, and questions about reserves precede a clearer picture—sometimes benign, sometimes not.
ZachXBT has spent 2026 pressing centralized exchanges on exactly this kind of accountability, from his campaign against Bitget’s leadership to his repeated demands that platforms explain anomalous on-chain activity. The harder precedents are sobering: WazirX’s prolonged withdrawal freeze and subsequent restructuring showed how quickly stuck withdrawals can escalate into a solvency and legal crisis, though every case differs, and AscendEX’s outcome is far from determined.
There is also an immediate, practical risk for anyone with funds on the platform. Users reporting stuck withdrawals are already being targeted by “recovery” operatives—accounts and services that promise to retrieve frozen assets for an upfront fee or private contact. These are a well-documented follow-on scam that preys on victims of exchange distress, and they should be avoided entirely; legitimate fund recovery does not begin with a stranger in a comment thread demanding payment.
For now, the situation sits in an uncomfortable middle ground: credible, multi-source reports of a real withdrawal problem and an investigator’s on-chain warning, set against the absence of a substantive explanation from the exchange and the inherent limits of hot-wallet analysis. What would resolve it is straightforward and entirely in AscendEX’s hands—a clear public statement on the cause of the delays, a timeline for restoring withdrawals, and verifiable proof of reserves. Until those arrive, the unanswered questions are the story, and the burden of answering them rests with the platform.
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