Philippine Digital Asset Exchange (Pdax), a Philippine crypto exchange, has gone through a rather expensive technical failure, which sold bitcoin for 300,000 Philippine pesos ($6,000), lower by 88% than the current price of the cryptocurrency.
Amidst the confusion, some people have actually gone and bought BTC at this price and swiftly moved it from their exchange wallets before the error could be detected. The total amount of BTC bought at this price is not known at the moment.
But now Pdax is asking its users to return the bitcoin or face legal action. Some of the clients are already locked out from their accounts by the exchange. Traders aren’t planning on giving in, though.
“After almost 24 hours, they sent me a demand letter and SMS, requesting me to transfer back the BTC, or they ‘may’ be compelled to take legal actions against me,” commented one of the traders who bought the BTC at the discount price who believes no rules and regulations of the platform were broken.
A lawyer who represents a Pdax user, Rafael Padilla, declared:
“Our client’s trade transaction was legitimate under applicable laws, decided cases, and of course according to Pdax’s very own terms and conditions/user agreement.”
Padilla argues that Pdax has decided to lock users out of their accounts as it finds itself in the position of not being able to unilaterally reverse the transactions.
The exchange dealt with outages starting with February the 16th, which were blamed on “unprecedented levels of trading and volatility.” Nichel Gaba, the CEO of Pdax, said that 95% of accounts were already restored, but some users are still locked out of their accounts.
On February the 23rd, Gaba declared: “It’s very understandable that a lot of users will feel upset they were able to buy what they thought an order was there for bitcoin at very low prices. But unfortunately, the underlying bitcoins were never in the possession of the exchange, so there’s never really anything there to be bought or sold, unfortunately.”