Crypto exchange Binance provided an update to users after several tokens on the platform seemingly plummeted to $0 following Friday’s market downturn, clarifying that these tokens did not actually crash but displayed a $0 price due to a “display issue.”
During Friday’s market chaos, several altcoins, including IoTeX (IOTX), Cosmos (ATOM), and Enjin (ENJ), appeared to drop to $0 on Binance, even though these tokens remained above $0 on other centralized crypto exchanges.
According to an announcement from Binance on Sunday, the tokens did not lose 100% of their value. Binance explained:
“Certain trading pairs, such as IOTX/USDT, recently reduced the number of decimal places allowed for minimum price movement, which caused the displayed prices in the user interface to be zero, representing a display issue rather than an actual $0 price.”
The Binance exchange became the focus of controversy following the market crash that wiped out up to $20 billion in leveraged positions — the worst 24-hour crypto liquidation in market history.
Related: Market crash ‘does not have long-term fundamental implications’ — Analyst
Traders speculate Binance may have faced a coordinated attack
There are suggestions that Binance may have been the target of a malicious exploit, which caused Ethena’s USDe synthetic dollar to lose its dollar peg on the platform, dropping to just $0.65, according to crypto trader ElonTrades, who speculated on the cause of the incident.
The attackers allegedly exploited digital assets on Binance’s “Unified Account” feature, which uses internal order book data rather than external oracles, according to ElonTrades.
Binance had previously announced plans to resolve the issue by sourcing price feeds from external oracles by October 14, providing an opportunity for threat actors to exploit the mechanism and create significant price discrepancies, as theorized by ElonTrades.
This led to a cascade of liquidations totaling up to $1 billion on Binance, which escalated into a market-wide contagion, he concluded.
Binance has already pledged a total of $283 million in compensation for victims who faced liquidation due to the depegging event.
In spite of this, Kris Marszalek, the CEO of crypto exchange Crypto.Com, has called for regulatory investigations into centralized exchanges that suffered substantial losses during Friday’s historic market crash.
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