Binance-backed decentralized exchange (DEX) Aster has completed its compensation program for users impacted by an abnormal price movement in the perpetual trading pair for XPL, the newly-launched native cryptocurrency of the stablecoin-focused layer-1 blockchain Plasma.
Aster was championed by Binance co-founder and chairman Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao, becoming an inadvertent market rival of Hyperliquid, even surpassing it in daily perpetual trading volume. A key feature that differentiates Aster from other on-chain perp DEXs is that it allows traders to place fully invisible limit orders on the orderbook.
Indexing Issue on XPLUSDT Perpetual Contract Causes Aster Traders’ Positions to be Liquidated
On Thursday, September 25, the BNB Chain-native, multi-chain exchange detected unusual behavior in its XPL perpetual contract, after the coin’s price surged from around $1.30 as seen on other exchanges to over $4. The Aster team attended to the situation within minutes, suspending all XPL trading activity and pledging to protect affected users.
In an X post, the exchange stated it is aware of abnormal price movements on the XPL perpetual trading pair, assuring traders that their funds are safe on the platform and that it is conducting a full review of the incident to compensate any losses.
According to some community members, the issue stemmed from a misconfigured indexing operation during the transition of Aster’s XPL market from pre-launch to live trading. On-chain analysts speculated that during testing, the exchange had hard-coded the index price at $1, with the mark price capped at $1.22. However, when the controls were lifted without correcting the index to align with its real-time market price, the contract briefly spiked to $4, triggering liquidations before snapping back. The result was a sudden surge that froze before falling back to the more realistic levels of $1.30 seen on other exchanges.
Several traders were liquidated during the incident, but the total value of the losses is unknown, as is the compensation amount distributed by Aster. However, users estimate the impact to be worth millions of dollars. Metrics from DeFiLlama — Aster protocol metrics confirm the sudden spike in trading activity.
Aster Compensates All Users Affected by the XPL Perp Trading Pair Issue, but the Incident Raises Concerns on Risks Associated with DEXs
Aster managed to fix the token indexing issue within 30 minutes of being notified. The exchange wrote in a subsequent X post that all XPLUSDT perpetual contract traders, who suffered losses, would be reimbursed, with the compensation amount being sent to their wallets in USDT. While the exchange’s swift action restored investor confidence, the incident highlights the risks that still exist in decentralized derivatives trading, proving that token configuration errors can become costly disruptions.
Nonetheless, affected traders reported that they received refunds within hours of the mishap, but some users raised concerns about losing their ‘Rh’ trading points, with one user replying below Aster’s X post that their points balance dropped from 500,000 to 112,000. Meanwhile, another user said they managed to recover their points after following the dev team’s instructions to sync their accounts with the backend server.
Aster Surpasses Hyperliquid in Daily Perp Trading Volume, $ASTER Market Cap Surges Past $3 Billion
Despite the could-have-been-worse hiccup, Aster continues to post impressive growth figures. According to data sourced by Dune Analytics, the exchange has generated $16.3 million in trading fees in the last 24 hours, which is 3 times that of the $4.9 million in daily trading fees received by Hyperliquid. User adoption figures are also rising, with more than 2.57 million traders active on the platform. The DEX managed to add nearly 468,000 new accounts in the past 24 hours, reflecting the rising demand for on-chain perpetual platforms.
Meanwhile, the exchange’s native token, ASTER, is also drawing significant traction. One whale wallet recently acquired 55 million ASTER, worth $100 million, in two days. The token was launched on September 17 and has already surged to a market cap above $3 billion.
The incident on Aster occurred the very same day XPL made its market debut, following the Plasma mainnet launch. The blockchain has already amassed over $2 billion in total value locked, placing it among the top 10 protocols by stablecoin liquidity.
At the time of writing, Plasma (XPL) and Aster (ASTER) are trading at $1.17 (+17.8% in 24h) and $1.83 (-9.09% in 24h), respectively.