The Wild $12B VOXEL Sideshow: Crypto’s Greatest Houdini Act?

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Now, if you ever thought the world of cryptocurrency was all solemn charts and serious talk, hold on to your hat. On April 20th, a little-known critter called VOXEL on the Bitget exchange decided to put on a show. It racked up over $12 billion in trading volume faster than a frog can wink, leaving the same contract over on Binance looking like a sleepy backyard toad.

This frenzy happened with VOXEL/USDT perpetual futures, where traders reportedly watched orders fill up quicker than hotcakes on a Sunday morning. Some folks called it a “bug,” though others whispered conspiracies as sly as a fox in a henhouse about market makers and their shenanigans. Turns out, clever traders found a loophole wider than the Mississippi river and made fortunes faster than a cat on a hot tin roof.

When Bitget got wind of this ruckus, they did a quick double-take, suspended a few accounts with suspicious footprints and rolled back the trades like a riverboat captain rewinding the wheels. Folks who got caught on the wrong side of the ride even got some compensation — a rare bit of Southern hospitality in the cutthroat crypto swamp.

But here’s the rub: Bitget’s hush-hush act leaves more questions than a Sunday sermon. They brag about their open APIs and a posse of over a thousand market makers and institutional varmints, but who cooked up this April 20 mess? That remains a secret tighter than a tick on a hound dog.

This silent treatment stirred up old rumors, much like the infamous Binance brouhaha back in March, involving tokens named GoPlus (GPS) and MyShell (SHELL) crashing faster than a Mississippi steamboat. Binance promptly gave the boot to some unnamed market maker and left the gossip mills spinning faster than a hawk after a squirrel.

Traders Cry “Bug!” Bitget Says “Nuh-uh!” 🤨

The local crypto townsfolk claimed VOXEL’s price hopped between $0.125 to $0.138 like a frog on a hot skillet, and orders filled instantaneously — thanks to what they suspected was a market maker bot gone haywire. An X user named Dylan even shared pictorial proof, showing how some folks turned this bug into a “zero-cost exploit” faster than you can say “Jack Robinson.”

Perpetual futures usually require a trading partner, but this bug made trades fly solo, as if they had their own wings. Another user, Qingshui, said savvy traders pulled off high-leverage bets, turning this glitch into a gold rush. And when Bitget blocked profit-hungry traders from collecting their due, well, you can imagine the raised eyebrows and the colorful language flying around.

Hebi555, another X user, accused Bitget’s market-making outfit of playing a poor fiddle in this crazy dance. Bitget’s head honcho for Asia, Xie Jiayin, shot back, saying they’ve got over a thousand market makers hustling daily and that their API is as open as a preacher’s Sunday sermon. Of course, specifics about these market makers are locked up tighter than Fort Knox under confidentiality agreements.

Bitget’s big boss lady, Gracy Chen, told CryptoMoon that the suspicious trades were between individual users — not the platform itself. When pressed further, she danced around whether a market maker bot was the culprit, sticking to the party line that it was just “trading between users.”

“We’re looking into it, and once we roll back the mess, we’ll lift restrictions,” said Chen, adding with a wink that their security system sniffed out this oddity in real-time — a rare silver lining in this crypto circus.

Another Day, Another Market Manipulation Mystery 🕵️‍♂️

The crypto realm’s murky waters keep stirring. Just last March, two tokens named GPS and SHELL took a nosedive shortly after hitting Binance, thanks to the same mysterious market maker. Binance kicked said miscreant to the curb and used its ill-gotten gains to pay back the poor souls swindled in the process. Still, with no villain named, the rumor mill churned faster than a Mississippi paddlewheel.

Not to be left out, Binance booted another market maker over some dealings with the Movement (MOVE) token, which just so happened to be linked to the earlier troublemakers. It’s starting to look like a small town with a whole lotta skeletons in the closet.

A recent CryptoMoon tale revealed market makers cozying up with projects using loan-based schemes — where they get tokens for liquidity but then dump ’em like hot potatoes, wrecking the token’s price charts and stirring up heartbreak among smaller projects.

VOXEL Shennanigans Aren’t Just a CEX Thing 🤷‍♂️

Bitget and Binance teach us one thing: even the biggest horse in the race ain’t immune to manipulation or clever traders outsmarting the system. But it ain’t limited to centralized exchanges, neither.

Over on the decentralized side at Hyperliquid, a whale pulled off an exploit by messing with liquidation rules, causing their JELLY perpetual futures to get the boot. How did they handle it? You guessed it — compensation, just like Big Bitget.

Funny enough, Bitget’s Chen had some choice words for Hyperliquid, calling them out for centralization issues and comparing ’em to FTX — that infamous firm whose founder is now on a decades-long vacation behind bars for fraud. Harsh words, and maybe a touch of schadenfreude.

“Their handling of the JELLY mess was immature, unethical, and downright unprofessional, scaring off users and casting shadows on their reputation,” Chen said, adding with a grimace that despite Hyperliquid’s flashy pitch as a decentralized exchange, it runs more like an offshore CEX without the proper ID checks, opening the door to bad actors.

So here we stand: Bitget’s VOXEL chaos contained, Hyperliquid making amends, but the bigger picture is clear as mud. In this great crypto rodeo, the dangers aren’t just the bugs or the exploits — it’s the awkward silence that follows, leaving everyone guessing who’s holding the winning hand while the rest of us are left holding the bag.

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2025-04-21 17:53