Aster, a decentralized exchange for perpetual contracts supported by YZi Labs and linked to Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, has refunded traders who lost money after an unusual price jump in its XPL contract.
Main Points:
- Aster quickly paid back traders in USDT after a mistake with the XPL price caused forced sell-offs.
- The jump was probably caused by a mistake when moving from testing to real trading.
- Even after what happened, Aster’s presence in the market is still increasing and has lately overtaken Hyperliquid in daily sales.
The problem happened late Thursday night when the price of XPL suddenly went up to over $4, even though it was around $1. 30 on other sites.
In a message on X, Aster said they know about the problem and assured users that “all funds are safe. ” They promised to investigate fully and compensate those traders who were affected.
Aster Starts Quick USDT Refunds After XPL Price Problem
About an hour later, the exchange said the problem was fixed and started giving back USDT to users who lost money.
The first round of payments was finished in three hours, and then payments for trading and selling fees were made.
People in the community think that the problem might have happened because of a mistake made when moving XPL contracts from being tested to actually trading.
Some users said that Aster had fixed the index price at $1 and limited the mark price while testing.
When those controls were removed without matching the current market, it caused a sudden price jump that forced some people to sell their assets. Aster hasn’t officially said what the cause is, but they are still looking into it.
The amount of money lost is not known, but traders think it could be in the millions.
The XPL listing happened only a few hours after the launch of Plasma, a Layer 1 blockchain that focuses on stablecoins.
Plasma launched with over $2 billion in stablecoins, which quickly made it one of the top 10 blockchains for stablecoin value. XPL, its main token, quickly reached a value of over $12 billion.
The event happens as Aster is gaining more attention in the market. Since it launched its ASTER token on September 17, the platform’s value jumped from $560 million to more than $15 billion.
Aster has recently surpassed its competitor Hyperliquid in daily trading volume and is expected to finish the month with record numbers.
Aster’s special “hidden orders” feature lets users place secret limit orders. This helps Aster stand out in the busy world of perpetual decentralized exchanges (DEX), where being open and clear is usually expected.
Aster Fuels Perp DEX sees a huge increase with a record volume of $70 billion.
Trading on decentralized exchanges reached a new high of $70 billion on Thursday, making it the third day in a row that trading volumes increased.
Aster, a new trading platform on BNB Chain, played a big role in the rise, making almost $36 billion, which is more than half of all trading activity on decentralized exchanges. It did better than Hyperliquid and Lighter.
The increase comes after a week of rapid growth for Aster, which reached over $24. 7 billion in sales the day before.
A lot of the platform’s growth comes from incentive farming. Users earn points by trading, creating, or keeping assets, which makes them qualify for future rewards.
According to the founder and CEO Star Xu, the crypto exchange OKX created a trading platform for continuous trading, like Hyperliquid and ASTER, but postponed its launch because of worries about regulations.
