- Aster refunded users fully after abnormal price swings occurred with XPL token trading.
- The price spike resulted from a hardcoded index price and a capped mark price, which were later removed.
- XPL’s perpetual futures on Aster experienced large fluctuations, unlike its spot market.
- The price of Aster’s native token dropped 12% after the incident.
- Affected users received compensation in USDT, with further assistance available via Discord.
Aster, a decentralized exchange operating on BNB Chain, refunded users in full after sudden and abnormal price changes affected trading of the newly launched XPL token. The incident took place on Thursday, leading the exchange to return funds to users who lost money during the event.
According to Aster, the issue stemmed from a “hardcoded” index price and a capped mark price that artificially kept XPL’s value near $1 and $1.22, respectively. Once these pricing controls were lifted, the price of XPL on the exchange’s perpetual futures spiked as high as $4 before dropping as low as $0.55. In contrast, XPL’s spot price ranged only between $0.74 and $1.54 during the same period. After two rounds of compensation, Aster confirmed that all affected users have received refunds in USDT stablecoin and encouraged any users still awaiting refunds to contact the support team via Discord.
On-chain analytics firm Bubblemaps highlighted social media claims that the price issues resulted from the mistaken use of a hardcoded XPL index price—as though it were a stablecoin instead of a regular network token. One post explained that when the capped mark price was lifted, XPL’s value soared on perpetual futures but remained steady elsewhere. “Those values should never be hardcoded,” a pseudonymous analyst known as 0xToolman told Decrypt.
Perpetual futures differ from spot trading in that traders do not directly own the asset, but bet on its price movements. Errors in how token prices are tracked can therefore cause significant volatility. After the compensation, XPL is trading at about $1.17, aligning with market valuations reported by CoinGecko.
Meanwhile, Aster’s own token has fallen 12% to $1.80. Confidence in Aster also dropped, as reflected by a decline in betting odds on the prediction market Myriad, which saw the chance of Aster’s token reaching $4 before November fall from 38% to 27%.
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