Poloniex rolls back trading history following ‘erroneous’ activities

Poloniex cryptocurrency exchange had to roll back trading history after it experienced erroneous activities. The exchange announced the mishap on Twitter, claiming that it had resulted from a bug it had introduced. All the orders made during this period were removed from the system, with the exchange also halting any withdrawals.

Poloniex took to Twitter to reveal the incident via its customer support account. The Boston, Massachusetts-based exchange claimed that its automated balance audits caught the error caused by a bug it had introduced to its systems. It had then placed the site into maintenance mode. The Poloniex team immediately set out to find the bug and deploy a fix.

Today, at 17:53 UTC, we introduced a bug that briefly caused trades to be executed erroneously. Our automated balance audits caught the error and placed the site into maintenance mode. We have identified the bug and deployed a fix.

— Poloniex Customer Support (@PoloSupport) February 10, 2020

Poloniex revealed that it rolled back the trade history in the 12 minutes that the bug infected the system, from 17:53 UTC to 18:05 UTC on February 10. All the orders that users placed or executed during the period were removed from the system. The exchange also cancelled any pending withdrawals briefly.

Poloniex was able to fix its error and about an hour later, it opened all markets, first in post-only mode to allow traders to adjust orders to reflect current prices. Full trading however took much longer, with some users on social media claiming they had to wait for up to six hours to begin trading again.

Maintenance has been completed and all markets are now open in post-only mode to allow traders to adjust orders to reflect current prices. We will re-enable full trading shortly. Thank you for your patience.

— Poloniex Customer Support (@PoloSupport) February 10, 2020

The exchange didn’t disclose what hitch the bug caused exactly, with media inquests remaining unanswered.

Traders were not amused by the glitch, with some taking to social media to condemn the exchange. Expectedly, many were concerned that their cryptos would be lost during the maintenance. None has reported any funds lost at press time. Other traders expressed concern over the revenue lost during the downtime, with some traders being unable to trade for up to 18 hours.

The traders had every right to be concerned as this isn’t the first time Poloniex has experienced a technical glitch. The last time it happened, margin lender on the platform lost $13.5 million. As CoinGeek reported, a price crash for CLAM crypto token in May last year saw margin lender incur significant losses after Poloniex was unable to process automatic liquidations of CLAM tokens. It blamed the losses on the low liquidity in the CLAM market. It also claimed that many of the loans were collateralized in CLAM and thus, “both the borrowers’ positions and their collateral lost most of their value simultaneously.”