A price cut of 88% on Bitcoin was seen on the PDAX exchange platform after a technical malfunction, and the service was suspended temporarily after that. PDAX hosted a press conference after this incident to communicate what actually happened with the exchange system.
A Glitch
PDAX is one of the biggest Southeast Asian cryptocurrency exchange companies. The company issued a public statement on 16th Feb 2021, and they are blaming a tech glitch as an explanation for the drop in price of Bitcoin to roughly 300,000 PHP, which is worth around $6100.
An unspecified number of PDAX clients were able to purchase thousands of Bitcoins at the PDAX exchange platform on record-breaking discounts. These transactions made these clients worth billions in their local currency on paper, but this streak was very short-lived.
Operations Halted
The company closed down its servers for 36 hours due to a glitch in the system. This issue is still not resolved, apparently, as many users are still reported to be locked out of their accounts on the exchange platform.
Various people posted tweets, saying that they are not able to access their accounts, and some had even been locked out for more than seven days and are still not being allowed to access their wallets. A person also said that PDAX has been reportedly reversing transactions from the user’s accounts while they locked everyone out of the system and that they are lying about making the accounts accessible again because many people still are not able to log in to their accounts.
A PDAX user posted on Reddit, saying that they purchased the low-cost Bitcoins and asking if they have a legal leg to stand on in terms of not returning those Bitcoins to the company, and they received a flood of mixed replies as expected.
The user further clarified that they were able to reroute their bitcoins to an external wallet before PDAX closed down the system. Also that they received a text and a demand letter from the company after a day, asking them to return the Bitcoins or else they will take legal action against them.
The CEO of PDAX, Nichel Gaba, explained on 23rd Feb that it was a system glitch that could happen to any system and that the company did not own those BTC to begin with, so there was actually nothing to be sold or bought. Binance and Coinbase also faced some service problems this year.