Short-lived joy – After a few thousand dollars graciously offered by Uniswap, Crypto.com redeems your ETH for $ 80,000. At least that’s what a nasty bug on the app allowed.
ETH Price at $ 80,000 on Crypto.com
Crypto.com is a cryptocurrency exchange platform, whose activities are varied. Staking, lending, loan, credit card,… Crypto.com works on all fronts.
Although the platform is known for cryptocurrency sales events at rock bottom prices, the opposite happened over the weekend.
Users of the app were able to spot an ETH price of $ 80,000 on the ETH / USDT pair , an amount that represents an increase of over 20,000%.
I’ll give ya 20 ETH for that price!! Please don’t exit scam with my finds @Cryptocom pic.twitter.com/8HTrncJV8X
— Thomas Gardner (@TG4Freedom) September 20, 2020
The event will have been short-lived. However, within a few minutes, some internet users managed to take advantage of the error and resell their ETH at a high price.
Alerted to the problem, Crypto.com immediately put on hold deposits, withdrawals and its trading service. The platform took the opportunity to reassure its users about the security of their funds.
Update: Deposits, withdrawals, and trading for our Exchange and App are still paused, while the team is working on the temporary system maintenance.
We will update once trading is resumed. Rest assured that your funds are safe with us. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
— Crypto.com (@cryptocom) September 20, 2020
The origin of the problem
In the hours following the incident, Kris Marszalek, CEO of Crypto.com, posted an explanatory report via a twitter thread.
Update on the overnight system maintenance:
1. Funds are safe.
2. The maintenance will likely take 24-48 hours
What happened? See thread below.— Kris | Crypto.com (@Kris_HK) September 21, 2020
In fact, a database problem caused an outage. This would have allowed users to manipulate the price of the ETH / USDT pair. Some of the users who noticed the bug rushed to sell their ETH en masse.
Fortunately for Crypto.com, its risk system immediately blocked withdrawals that had been initiated.
“Since the risk systems kicked-in almost immediately, our monetary loss from this event is negligible. How is this going to be resolved? – some illegitimate trades will be reversed and balances restored – it’s a complex, time consuming process, hence long downtime” , Kris Marszalek
An update has since been underway to restore the system and to “cancel certain illegitimate exchanges”. Bad luck for users who thought they had sold their ETH at a high price.
“My apologies to all our users. The team will be on it 24/7 until we are back online. We will learn from this outage and strengthen all systems accordingly. We will be posting regular updates as we get a more accurate timeline to resume trading.” , Kris Marszalek
In the meantime, Crypto.com users will have to take their trouble patiently until the platform returns. A break that may help them recover from this unprecedented euphoria.
