Bitget Battles Market Manipulation with Legal Action on VOXEL Futures

Bitget has initiated legal proceedings against alleged traders involved in manipulating the price of VOXEL futures contracts. The platform’s CEO, Gracy Chen, clarified to Cointelegraph that these transactions were carried out between individual traders and did not involve the platform directly.

On April 20, Bitget detected unusual trading activity on its VOXEL/USDT perpetual futures contract, which saw a trading volume exceeding $12 billion—much higher than similar contracts on other exchanges like Binance. In response, Bitget suspended accounts suspected of market manipulation and reversed the irregular trades to recover the profits gained from them.

The exchange is now sending legal notices to eight account holders believed to have orchestrated the incident and profited approximately $20 million collectively. According to Bitget’s Chinese operations head, these accounts are the main instigators and have gained improperly from the event. She assured that other users who participated in VOXEL trading on April 20 and have since withdrawn their funds are not under threat, as their accounts have been restored and no further action will be taken against them.

Bitget plans to fully return the recovered funds to affected users via airdrops, even as a comprehensive incident report is being prepared. Some users suggested that the incident was caused by a bug in a market maker bot, which led to excessive trading volume for VOXEL. Early traders who identified the bug reportedly used high-leverage strategies to exploit the situation at no cost.

VOXEL is the utility token for Voxies, a blockchain-based, free-to-play, 3D turn-based tactical RPG game built on Ethereum. A similar incident occurred on March 27 on the Hyperliquid platform, where a whale exploited liquidation parameters to make at least $6.26 million from the JELLY token. Hyperliquid subsequently delisted futures tied to JELLY due to suspicious market activity