Poloniex has initiated a refund for customers who lost $13.5 million (1800 bitcoins) in May 2019. The platform indicates that this is only 0.4%, yet the frustration within the community has been felt a lot.
On May 26th, the price of CLAM fell from $20.30 to $6.10 in what was called a two-hour flash crash, resulting in a 77% loss in just 45 minutes. The sudden collapse of the cryptocurrency combined with the lack of liquidity has led users of Poloniex, an exchange that offers the possibility of margin trading with BTC, to lose the modest figure of 1,800 bitcoins (about 13.5 million dollars).
To cover the losses, Poloniex had decided to carry out a cut of 16.2% from all active BTC loans, a move not appreciated by customers nor by investors. On June 14th, Poloniex had already made an initial repayment of 180.73 bitcoins (BTC), well below the 1,800 BTC lost.
Poloniex: the refund starts in August
Through a statement issued on August 12th, Poloniex announced its intention to begin refunding all users in August, by means of a giving back the fees on transactions: every time a trading operation is executed, the fee will be paid by the user but will be returned in the form of bitcoin (BTC), starting from all transactions that have been made from June 6th onwards.
The exchange, which belongs to Circle, supported by Goldman Sachs, has chosen to take the simplest path in order to limit the lawsuits that the users could have initiated.
Poloniex knows that the only way to make sure that the situation ends positively for everyone is to refund its customers as quickly as possible, although recovering millions of dollars through fees may take several months and is certainly not the quickest way.
