Binance CEO accidentally shames “market maker”

Even Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, one of the largest crypto-exchanges in the world, makes mistakes. Zhao shamed a market maker from a smaller futures exchange today for trying to manipulate Binance’s new future exchange, only to later learn that it was “an accident”. 

Binance's futures platform, where traders can bet that the price of Bitcoin will rise or fall, opened for business Friday, having previously been in beta.

Zhao thought that the market maker was trying to attack the Binance futures exchange after futures prices briefly dipped from $10324.98 to $10042.81. An attacker could take advantage of the price dip to buy at low prices, and sell as soon as they popped back up. Victims, however, would lose out by accidentally making bad trades. 

But nobody was hurt, tweeted Zhao: because the futures platform uses the index price for liquidations, not the futures price. “Only the attacker lost a bunch of money, and that was that,” he tweeted. If only the story ended there: “Had a chat with the client. It was an accident, due to a bad parameter on their side. Not intentional. All good now,” he tweeted. 

Changpeng Zhao could be forgiven for making such a mistake: others in the business have made similar errors. The Kraken Exchange tweeted Saturday that a test of an advanced order type caused a bug, which led to some order prices being matched against the wrong side of the book. “Some clients bought from the tester at $8,000 and others sold at $12,000 without clearing the intervening liquidity.”

Kraken's Client Engagement Team told Decrypt that the two do "not appear to be related as each exchange is separate and maintains its own order books."