Furious Traders Slam Crypto Exchange for Fiddling With Contracts
- ‘OKEx is losing credibility’: trader who took a $700,000 hit
- Exchange says it acted to protect clients from volatility
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An unorthodox move by one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency platforms to change the terms on $135 million of derivative contracts has infuriated traders and saddled some of them with losses, underscoring the risks of using unregulated virtual currency exchanges.
The episode at Hong Kong-based OKEx, which claims to handle more than $1 billion of crypto trades daily, involved futures on Bitcoin Cash, the virtual currency that split into two last week. In a decision that traders described as unusual if not unprecedented, OKEx forced the early settlement of its Bitcoin Cash contracts without warning on Nov. 14, just as prices were tumbling.