Bitget sues traders over coordinated VOXEL pump and $20M profits
Bitget investigates VOXEL trading scandal after system glitch
Crypto exchange Bitget is investigating the cause of last week’s incident that allowed the little-known gaming token VOXEL to temporarily surpass Bitcoin in trading volumes, enabling some traders to earn around $20 million through a speculative frenzy.
Bitget announced it will file lawsuits against eight users who exploited unconventional trading practices to spike the price of VOXEL by more than 100% to $0.14 in a short period.The event was accompanied by a platform hardware malfunction, which falsely displayed a daily trading volume of $13 billion for VOXEL, overshadowing Bitcoin's daily volume.
Industry experts noted that the glitch allowed some traders to generate massive profits using investments of less than $100. Following the incident, Bitget stated it detected abnormal trading behavior and temporarily froze the affected accounts. Later, the exchange reversed the irregular transactions to reclaim illicit profits.
On April 27, Bitget executive Ce Jiayin said the individuals were part of a coordinated "fraud group" that exploited a system vulnerability.
“It is believed that these eight accounts belong to a connected professional fraud group, which was the main perpetrator of the VOXEL incident and illicitly profited over $20 million,” Ce said.
Bitget did not provide further details about the group or the individuals involved but promised to release a full report detailing the incident to maintain transparency and rebuild community trust.The platform assured users that those who legally traded VOXEL between 16:00 and 16:30 UTC on April 20 and withdrew their funds would not be penalized. It also promised to compensate users affected by the VOXEL trading error through an airdrop program.
Heroes of the week: who are they?
Meanwhile, the Bitget incident made VOXEL one of the top-performing gaming tokens last week.VOXEL is the utility token for the tactical game and metaverse Voxie Tactics, allowing players to purchase weapons, armor, and other in-game items. VOXEL tokens can be bought in-game and sold on secondary markets, similar to Voxies NFTs.
VOKSEL price dynamics for 30 days. Source: CoinMarketCap
According to CoinMarketCap, at the time of writing, VOXEL was trading at around $0.076. Its price has remained relatively stable over the month, aside from the April 20 trading incident on Bitget.
As we wrote, Cryptocurrency exchange and Web3 firm Bitget has completed the burn of 30 million Bitget Tokens (BGB), equivalent to roughly $130 million, as part of its quarterly token burn program.
