Let’s consider a hypothetical scenario: What if your favorite cryptocurrency exchange starts offering Bitcoins at the lowest price you can imagine, i.e., zero dollars? For one user trading on a Japanse exchange, this scenario happened in reality.
A massive blunder at Zaif, a government-registered exchange, allowed customers to buy Bitcoins with zero yen value for about 20-minutes. As per a Reuters report, the exchange is run by Osaka-based Tech Bureau Corp.
After discovering the error on 16th Feb, the exchange voided all the trades and corrected the balances of users.
Free Bitcoins worth $20 trillion??
However, the exchange was still trying to resolve issues with one user that tried to transfer a huge amount of Bitcoins. The report states that the user in question bought about 2,200 trillion yen worth of bitcoin at a negligible price and further tried to cash it out.
In USÂ dollars, this amount converts to about $20 trillion. This is even more surprising as the total market cap of Bitcoin is just $180 billion.
The exchange has apologized to its customers for this massive screwup and pledged to make amends.
Prio to this incident, the exchange had already faced probes last month after a theft of $530 million from Coinchek Inc. Notably, Zaif is one of the 16 exchanges that are registered with the Japanese government.
What are your views on this hilarious and surprising incident? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Also Read: Hackers Take Control of Tesla’s Cloud Account To Mine Cryptocurrency
