Trading Halt

A trading halt is a temporary suspension of trading in a market, applied by an exchange rather than by the blockchain. Common triggers include a technical fault in the matching engine or price feed, a suspected data error, a network or bridge problem affecting deposits and withdrawals of the underlying asset, scheduled maintenance, or an upgrade such as a chain fork. During a halt, order matching stops; venues differ on whether resting orders are cancelled or preserved, and some run an auction on reopening to establish a price. Halts protect against trading on stale or corrupted information, but they also mean positions cannot be adjusted while prices continue to move on other venues, which is a real risk for leveraged accounts.