Aster Refunds Users After ‘Abnormal Price Movements’ on XPL—Here’s What Happened

Ascending decentralized exchange Aster has refunded users who lost funds due to “abnormal price movements” on the recently debuted XPL token on Thursday. The BNB Chain-based exchange has exploded in growth over the past week, but this marks its first notable slip-up.

After a couple of compensation rounds, Aster says users have been fully refunded in the USDT stablecoin. Any affected users who haven’t been refunded should reach out to the exchange via Discord.

XPL, which is the native staking token for the Plasma stablecoin-optimized blockchain, has traded at a peak of $1.54 and a low of $0.74 over the past 24 hours. However, on Aster’s perpetual futures contract, it had very different price movements, apparently peaking at $4 and bottoming out at $0.55.

On-chain analytics firm Bubblemaps pointed to a social media post by a Hyperliquid fan that claims Aster’s oracle price for XPL, also known as an index price, was “hardcoded” to $1—as if it were a stablecoin itself, rather than a network facilitating stablecoins. Meanwhile, its mark price, which usually fluctuates based on spot trading prices, was allegedly capped at $1.22.

If correct, it would explain why XPL’s price was suppressed. When the mark price was allegedly removed, the token then spiked to $4. This theory appears to have become the consensus across crypto social media, as well as for traders in the Aster Discord.

“[The] spike could be due to buy orders getting executed without enough sell orders to fill them, but this is just a guess,” 0xToolman, a pseudonymous on-chain sleuth for Bubblemaps, told Decrypt. “Those values should never be hardcoded.”

Aster did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.

Perpetual futures trading vs spot trading

It’s worth noting that perpetual futures trading works very differently from regular, spot trading. Perp trading does not technically mean owning the underlying asset, with the user instead betting on whether the token will go up or down by shorting or longing—often combined with heavy leverage.

With traders not directly owning the asset, the functions of tracking the token’s price are different from spot trading, which is where the XPL glitch originated.

Fortunately, anyone impacted by the blip has been fully refunded in USDT, Aster tweeted, after a couple of compensation rounds. The exchange urges any affected users who haven’t been refunded to open a ticket on Discord.

XPL is now trading at $1.17 on Aster, ironically in line with CoinGecko’s valuation.

Meanwhile, Aster’s token has dropped 12% on the day to $1.80, as the glitch cast doubt over the exchange. The chances of Aster hitting $4 before November have widened to just 27% on Myriad, a prediction market developed by Decrypt’s parent company DASTAN, down from 38% on Thursday morning.