Bitget will legally pursue 8 accounts suspected of profiting $20 million from VOXEL trading manipulation

Crypto exchange Bitget said it will legally pursue eight accounts suspected of manipulating the platform's VOXEL market, profiting $20 million as a result, as the platform continues to investigate the "abnormal trading activity" from last Sunday. 

On April 20, Bitget's market for a little-known token called VOXEL, the native token of Polygon-based RPG game Voxie Tactics, suddenly surged with volume as the token's price increased by more than 500% of its value two days prior. Bitget quickly announced it would be rolling back trades made in the market during a certain time frame while investigating the "abnormal trading" activity. 

While Bitget has yet to release a comprehensive post-mortem covering the incident, Bitget's Head of Asia Xie Jiayin said on X that the exchange will issue lawyer's letters to the owners of eight accounts suspected of acting as a "professional arbitrage" group to manipulate the market and profit over $20 million as a result. Typically, lawyer's letters are a prelude to more formal legal action. 

"All funds that are recovered will be returned to platform users 100 percent, via an airdrop," a translation of Xie's post states. "We will release a full incident report on the VOXEL matter as soon as possible to present the complete facts."

The $20 million exploit joins a growing number of hacks and exploits in recent weeks, including the $5.8 million exploit that hit Solana DeFi platform Loopscale two weeks after launch and a $49 million loss from stablecoin neoback Infini.