Due to an ongoing network upgrade, South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Upbit announced in a press statement on March 7 that it will be temporarily suspending NEAR deposits and withdrawals. According to the statement, the suspension will begin on March 11 at 18:00 and last until the network's stability is verified.

Users are advised not to deposit NEAR during the suspension time, according to Upbit, who also mentioned that the refund procedure for some tokens will be temporarily halted until NEAR deposits and withdrawals are allowed again.

The upcoming update will introduce a new resharding approach in order to overcome scalability threshold difficulties. In order to enable chunk-only producer testing, it also plans to limit the formation of non-implicit top-level accounts and modify the quantity of block producers and chunk producers on the testnet.

The action is in line with similar efforts taken by Binance, a different cryptocurrency exchange, which recently declared the suspension of Solana withdrawals and attributed the decision to the "increased volume of transactions on the network." Binance has scheduled the introduction of a “long-term solution” on March 9 at 18:00 (UTC), while the length of the suspension is still unknown.