Two days after several altcoins on Binance crashed to zero, the cryptocurrency exchange issued a statement today (Monday), blaming the incident on a “display issue”.
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Manipulation or a Glitch?
IoTeX, Cosmos, and Enjin are among several cryptocurrencies whose value on Binance hit $0 last Friday. However, their values were much higher than $0 on other centralised crypto exchanges at the same time.
“Certain trading pairs (such as IOTX/USDT) recently reduced the number of decimal places allowed for minimum price movement, causing the displayed prices in the user interface to be zero, which is a display issue and not due to an actual zero price,” Binance noted.
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The statement came amid a series of allegations of market manipulation on Binance by industry experts.
“Binance will optimise the UI display and apply UI display corrections for related abnormal prices,” the exchange continued.
The Largest Crypto Liquidation
The weekend crypto flash crash resulted in the liquidation of $19 billion in crypto positions, which is the highest in history.
The market also witnessed the depegging of USDE, BNSOL, and WBETH. Ethena’s USDe synthetic dollar dropped to $0.65. According to Binance, “the extreme market downturn occurred before the depegging.”
Binance also automatically sold off collateral altcoins to cover losses, creating a feedback loop that pushed prices down rapidly. The exchange later announced that it had paid out $283 million to cover losses from Friday's depegging.
The crypto exchange further explained that the one-sided liquidity issue also triggered the extreme sell-off during the turbulent hours.
“Historical limit orders (some dating back years, as far as 2019, e.g., IOTX, ATOM) had remained open on the platform,” Binance added. “During the extreme market sell-off and the lack of buying orders, sell orders continued to execute against these long-standing limit orders, pushing token prices to drop sharply for a short time.”
While Binance blamed the UI glitch and one-sided liquidity for the sudden drop in prices, Crypto.com’s CEO, Kris Marszalek, called for a regulatory investigation into exchanges that faced heavy liquidity issues, without naming Binance.
