According to details, traders walked away with as much as $100 million in just two hours after taking advantage of a major bot failure on Bitget.
The chaos that ensued came from $VOXEL, a relatively unknown cryptocurrency tied to a niche game called Voxie Tactics.
The market-making bot that malfunctioned was built to stabilize prices by automatically buying and selling $VOXEL at appropriate intervals.
However, it went rogue and started to create predictable 10% price shifts in both directions every few seconds.
By the time Bitget realized what was going on, the bot had been printing free money for over two hours, and traders had withdrawn massive amounts of BNB and SOL.
On 20 April, the crypto industry was hit by another massive crypto exploit, just months after the infamous Bybit hack.
According to details of the hack, traders walked away with as much as $100 million in just two hours after taking advantage of a major bot failure on Bitget.
A roller coaster of arbitrage chaos followed, before accusations and then a hit to Bitget’s reputation.
Here’s how things went down this week.
The chaos that ensued on Sunday came from $VOXEL, a relatively unknown cryptocurrency tied to a niche game called Voxie Tactics.
This token had a modest market cap of around $23 million and relatively low liquidity.
As such, it was never much on most traders’ radars.
However, this made VOXEL the perfect storm for the incident when Bitget’s market-making bot malfunctioned.
This problem started at around 19:22 UTC when a wallet containing $3 million began trading $VOXEL futures.
This inflow of liquidity caused the price of the token to start swinging violently.
The price of the token jumped and crashed by 10% every 2–3 seconds.
Traders who spotted this behavior quickly realized that a glitch had happened and jumped on the opportunity.
The market-making bot that malfunctioned was built to stabilize prices by automatically buying and selling $VOXEL at appropriate intervals.
However, it went rogue, and instead of working as intended, it started to create predictable 10% price shifts in both directions every few seconds.
Experienced traders took the opportunity and turned VOXEL into a slot machine that paid out every time.
These traders bought the cryptocurrency at its dip and sold it seconds after the 10% spike.
They even used leverage to amplify their gains and repeated the process over and over again.
One trader even reportedly turned $100 into $3 million in under 10 minutes, with another netting $42 million.
Word began to spread on social media, and more traders piled in to get a slice of the cake.
The exchange saw a staggering $12.7 billion in trading volume, which was three times that of Bitcoin on Bitget that day.
By the time Bitget realized what was going on, it was already too late.
The bot had been printing free money for over two hours, and traders had withdrawn massive profits in stablecoins like BNB and SOL.
The response from Bitget, although late, sparked even more outrage on the internet.
The exchange was forced to freeze several user accounts and reverse trades.
According to Bitget CEO Gracy Chen, the incident was a “market manipulation” and affected users would be compensated.
However, her statement did little to calm the storm, with one trader posting "I am very much disappointed in your support service".
Interestingly, BitGet had recently criticized Hyperliquid for a similar issue involving the $JELLY token.
Through it all, the recent incident has raised some questions about whether any centralized exchange is truly safe from internal or external exploits.
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