- Bitget is suing eight accounts accused of exploiting its VOXEL futures market to steal US$20M, freezing their accounts and rolling back trades.
- The exploit followed a suspicious 560% VOXEL price surge, triggering Bitget to suspend trading and launch an internal investigation.
- Bitget vowed to return recovered funds via an airdrop, but the incident raised questions about its internal controls after previously criticising rivals for similar lapses.
Bitget is coming for eight traders after a US$20M (AU$31M) exploit rocked its VOXEL perpetual futures market.
On April 27, Bitget’s head of Chinese operations, Xie Jiayin, said the exchange is sending legal letters to eight account holders accused of orchestrating the April 20 incident. These traders allegedly exploited Bitget’s systems to pocket the US$20M before the platform froze their accounts and rolled back the trades.
Jiayin posted on X:
These eight accounts are the main instigators of the VOXEL incident and have improperly gained more than $20 million.
Xie Jiayin, Bitget’s head of Chinese operationsBitget’s Investigation and Response to the Incident
The chaos started when VOXEL, the native token of Polygon-based game Voxie Tactics, spiked over 560% in two days, shooting from US$0.021 (AU$0.033) to US$0.139 (AU$0.22) before collapsing back to US$0.074 (AUS$0.012), according to CoinGecko.
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The suspicious volumes and erratic price action triggered Bitget’s internal alarms, leading to suspended trading, deposits, and withdrawals for certain accounts.
An official postmortem is still pending, but Bitget says it will airdrop 100% of recovered funds to affected users. Early speculation points to a bug in a market maker bot that traders spotted and exploited through high-leverage bets —a zero-cost attack that Bitget failed to catch before the damage was done.
But the damage was already done, dragging Bitget’s internal credibility into the spotlight. Bitget’s CEO, Gracy Chen, slammed decentralised exchange Hyperliquid for its own March 27 fiasco, calling its response to a US$6.2M (AU$9.6M) exploit involving the JELLY token “immature, unethical, and unprofessional”, warning Hyperliquid could become “FTX 2.0” if it didn’t clean up its act.
Now, Bitget faces similar accusations. When pressed, Xie insisted that “all the major market makers in the world have settled in Bitget” but declined to name any, citing confidentiality — hardly reassuring when the exchange is already under intense scrutiny.
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