Bitget takes legal action on alleged VOXEL futures price manipulation

Crypto exchange Bitget says it is sending letters from its lawyers to account holders it alleges were involved in manipulating the price of perpetual futures contracts tied to the VOXEL token.

Eight account holders that the exchange accuses of being involved in the April 20 incident and who allegedly pocketed $20 million between them will receive a letter from the exchange’s lawyers in “quick succession,” Xie Jiayin, Bitget’s head of Chinese operations, said in an April 27 X post.

“These eight accounts are the main instigators of the VOXEL incident and have improperly gained more than 20 million US dollars from it,” she said, according to a translation of the post.

“Except for these eight accounts, all other users who participated in VOXEL trading on April 20 and have withdrawn funds do not need to worry,” she added. “The accounts have been restored to normal and no responsibility will be pursued in the future.”

On April 20, Bitget said it discovered “abnormal trading activity” on its VOXEL/USDT perpetual futures contract and paused accounts it suspected of market manipulation.

The trading pair clocked over $12 billion in volume, dwarfing the metrics of the same contract on Binance. After the pause, Bitget rolled back the irregular trades to claw back the gains.

At the time, Bitget CEO Gracy Chen told Cointelegraph that the trades were between individual market participants, not the platform itself, and insisted the losses were not platform-wide and user funds remained safe.

Jiayin said Bitget plans to distribute 100% of the recovered funds to affected users through airdrops while a complete incident report is still in the works.

Some X users claimed the incident was caused by a bug in a market maker bot, which caused VOXEL’s excessive volume. Traders who spotted the suspected bug early used high-leverage bets to boost their profits in a zero-cost exploit.

Related: Bitget CEO slams Hyperliquid’s handling of ‘suspicious’ incident involving JELLY token

VOXEL is the native utility token of Voxies, a free-to-play, 3D turn-based tactical RPG game built on the Ethereum blockchain.

Decentralized exchange Hyperliquid suffered a similar incident on March 27, when a whale allegedly exploited the liquidation parameters to profit at least $6.26 million on the Jelly my Jelly (JELLY) memecoin.

Hyperliquid has since delisted perpetual futures tied to the JELLY token, citing evidence of suspicious market activity as the reason for the decision. 

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