Traders are up in arms on Halloween night after a rather ‘spooky’ pricing error hit a number of top cryptocurrency exchanges and trading platforms.
The error is believed to have been caused by Coinbase going offline which put the index pricing of certain derivatives exchange out of line with the actual price. Index pricing is needed on derivatives exchanges such as FTX to ensure that the price of the derivative corresponds to the actual price of the underlying physical Bitcoin.
Perhaps the biggest exchange by volume that was effected is Deribit. Which does close to 500,000,000$ in buying and selling on average a day. The pricing error caused their popular Bitcoin perpetual swap contract to fall 2000$ to 7750$ a Bitcoin.
Deribit in the past few minutes has released a statement saying that trader equity will be brought back to normal levels of 9160$. However trades will not be rolled back. This effectively means traders who used stop losses and/or were liquidated will be refunded.
One slightly smaller derivatives exchanges was also effected by a similar pricing error. That exchange being BTSE which sharply increased in price to 15000$ before whipsawing back to 6500$. Support teams in BTSE’s telegram chat have said all issues are working on being resolved and traders will be compensated. Their market has remained down for 5 hours at the time of writing.
