I am going to call it out as it is, Cryptsy is insolvent in terms of BTC, either due to a hack or outright theft by insiders. Either way, we are not being told the truth. There are many things that point to all this. Where do I even begin?
1. The most obvious problem: many, many users are reporting slow withdrawals of BTC. I have been observing the Cryptsy chat for the last two days, as well as other places online and especially since around Nov 25th, no one is getting their BTC withdrawals. It gets stuck in "pending". I myself tried withdrawing 5.5 BTC and it was stuck for half a day. I created a support ticket and it was ignored for a few hours. They responded with the generic "we are working on an issue" that everyone else is getting. I made a DOGE withdrawal around the same time, and that cleared within 5 minutes. So from that and from reading others' responses, I knew some alts withdrawals are working.
2. Not an issue with their site - Their support staff are working, as evidenced by their response to my tickets. Their system receives deposits correctly and timely, and DOGE withdrawals work well too. I withdrew various amounts several times and they all happened within 5 minutes. So the issue is specific to BTC/DASH/ETH and some other more popular coins. Which leads me to believe they simply have no coins to cover the withdrawal requests.
3. Complete silence on the issue: you will not find any statement or anything that remotely resembles an acknowledgement that there is a serious problem. People who cause too much fuss in the chat get banned, some for one year.
4. Big Vern himself posted a tweet on Oct 21st, right around the time when the Tier system was incorporated, that "there are some good deals to be had on Alts right now". This seems like a marketing ploy to boost volume slightly and make money off commissions, but the main added effect would be BTC coffers swelling at the expense of Alt coin wallets. It is possible the problem with solvency has began back then, and it does coincide with the first reports of delayed BTC withdrawals.
5. The importance of trust - from other big sites going belly up, exchange operators know that once users' trust is gone, it can never be fully regained again. If there was a technical issue, like a prolonged DDoS attack, they would have admitted it in a timely manner, everyone has problems once in a while, but admitting to it boosts trust in the user base. In this case, there is complete silence despite a very obvious serious problem, and it's only getting worse. I think the only logical explanation is that Paul Vern knows that the only way to save the ship is "a la pyramid style", if mass panic is avoided and if he can hold off on people withdrawing their BTC for just long enough, he can recuperate enough funds to keep going (in case Cryptsy was hacked). OR, if the funds were stolen by an insider, then he is just buying more time. It is obvious they are trying to avoid a run on the BTC wallet, and it's probably already completely insolvent given that no one has been able to withdraw even the smallest amounts in the last 4-5 days. (I even tried withdrawing small incremental amounts, as small as 0.049 BTC, and still it didn't go through).
Basically, I am confident this is the end of Cryptsy, there is no good reason for what's been happening and the silence on Cryptsy's part. Save your funds and GTFO while you still can. While we are on the subject, here is how I was able to get my ~9btc out of there since yesterday: buy Doge. Yes, you will take a hit. You only have a couple of viable options where to sell them later, right now you can buy them for 38-39sats on Cryptsy and sell them back on Poloniex for 32-33 sats, the situation is the same on BTC38, you can sell them for CNY and then buy BTC with CNY with the same result. You are losing about 15% in the process. From my research (and I stayed up most of the night yesterday looking at all sorts of options) Doge is the only currency that you can still buy on Cryptsy in large amounts and withdraw without issues.
If you have a stuck pending withdrawal of BTC, you can create a ticket asking to cancel your withdrawal. It's amazing how quickly they responded to 2 such tickets that I created. It's like they don't want you to even try taking out BTC, could it be because they don't have any?
Again, this is one option that you have, take it or leave it, I lost ~1btc in this process but I saved 8, to me it was worth the risk, because I am pretty sure this ship is not salvageable. Their shady practices combined with the fact that this is a wide-spread issue now, leads me to believe Cryptsy is, as of yet, unofficially insolvent.
One more thing, for anyone who wants to know where to look for their coins, here is the Founder and CEO's name and home address:
Paul E. Vernon
8656 Tourmaline Blvd.
Boynton Beach, FL 33472
This is publicly available information that can be discovered by anyone who does a little digging.
I wish everyone best of luck, and I hope this was helpful to at least some of you.