Binance has formally rejected claims that a platform pricing error or system malfunction caused more than $5 million in trader losses after the AKEUSDT perpetual contract surged from roughly $0.0076 to nearly $0.045 on September 3, 2026.
The dispute began after a trader, identified as X user xunlu, said more than 30 funding-rate arbitrage positions were liquidated within minutes around 5:44 a.m. UTC+8. The trader estimated losses above 5 million USDT and alleged the vertical move resulted from coordinated activity in the AKE market rather than normal trading. In response, Binance Customer Support said AKE experienced large price swings across several exchanges and on-chain markets during the same period, attributing the liquidations to market conditions.
Binance also said an internal review found no fault in its pricing model, risk controls or liquidation engine. The exchange stated its systems remained operational during the sharp move, leaving leveraged positions exposed to adverse price changes. The platform noted that a liquidation can occur even without an outage once a trader's collateral falls below the required maintenance margin.
Because Binance does not offer AKE on its spot market, the AKEUSDT mark price is calculated from external spot-market data. Binance said this multi-market index and the mark-price process functioned as intended during the volatility. Publicly available aggregated spot charts showed heavy volatility, but the highest combined spot reading was below the contract peak cited by the trader. The gap may reflect differences between the futures contract, external spot venues or the index used to produce the mark price, though no factor has been established.
The trader characterized the episode as a short squeeze. A move from about $0.0076 to nearly $0.045 would represent an increase of roughly 492%, or almost six times the starting price. Such a rapid rise can quickly reduce margin supporting short futures positions, especially when liquidity is thin and multiple trades share the same exposure. In an unrelated August market event, a $3 billion squeeze liquidated about $2.77 billion in short positions across major exchanges, with Binance accounting for around $518 million of the total.
The trader has requested transaction records, liquidation details and risk-control logs. Binance has not announced compensation and maintains that the AKE positions were closed because of market risk rather than an exchange pricing mistake. The dispute also references an earlier TUT liquidation incident in which competing exchanges compensated some affected users, but Binance has not agreed the two events are comparable.
