Bithumb Halts Ontology Withdrawals After ONT’s Blockchain Grinds to a Halt

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• Bithumb suspended deposits and withdrawals for Ontology (ONT), Ontology Gas (ONG) and MovieBloc (MBL) starting October 11, 2026 at 12:55 a.m. Korea Standard Time
• The exchange said the suspension was triggered because block production on the Ontology network had stopped, making it impossible to process transfers reliably
• Bithumb cited South Korea’s Virtual Asset User Protection Act in its notice and warned that trading would remain open even as prices could swing sharply during the outage

South Korea’s Bithumb exchange suspended deposit and withdrawal services for three tokens tied to the Ontology network, ONT, ONG and the video-rewards token MBL, in a notice published on October 11, 2026. The exchange said the root cause was that block production on the Ontology blockchain itself had stopped, meaning the underlying network was no longer finalizing new blocks and therefore could not be trusted to settle incoming or outgoing transfers accurately.

Bithumb’s notice invoked Article 17 of the Enforcement Decree of Korea’s Virtual Asset User Protection Act, the legal basis Korean exchanges use when pausing services tied to a token’s network-level problems rather than an issue specific to the exchange’s own systems. The law gives licensed exchanges cover to halt deposits and withdrawals when a blockchain’s operation becomes unstable, a protection meant to prevent users from having transactions processed against a chain state that could later be reorganized or rolled back once the network recovers.

Ontology is a layer-one blockchain focused on identity and data services, built by a team with roots in the NEO ecosystem, and ONG functions as its gas token used to pay for network operations, similar to how GAS works alongside NEO. MovieBloc, the third affected token, runs a content-rewards platform that settles activity using the Ontology network, which is why it shared the same deposit and withdrawal freeze even though it is a separate project built on top of Ontology’s infrastructure rather than a native Ontology asset.

Bithumb did not give a timeline for when block production might resume or what caused the halt in the first place, saying only that services would restart “once network stability is secured” and that it would post an update directly to the same notice when that happens. The exchange’s language left open whether the stoppage stemmed from a validator-level failure, a software bug in the Ontology client, or some other infrastructure problem affecting the handful of nodes responsible for producing new blocks on the network.

Trading in ONT, ONG and MBL remained active on Bithumb throughout the suspension, since matching orders inside the exchange’s own books does not require the underlying blockchain to be functioning. Bithumb explicitly warned users that this combination, open trading paired with frozen deposits and withdrawals, can produce unusually sharp price swings, because arbitrage flows that would normally even out price differences between exchanges cannot move the physical tokens in or out while the network remains stalled.

The notice, published on Bithumb’s official announcement feed, is the exchange’s standard format for network-level suspensions, and it did not name a specific validator or infrastructure provider responsible for the Ontology network’s block production. Users holding ONT, ONG or MBL directly in self-custody wallets outside Bithumb were not affected by the exchange-side freeze, though any wallet relying on the same halted network would have faced the identical inability to confirm new transactions.