Poloniex 'Last Resort' Trade Reversals Necessary to Safeguard Trader Funds

Cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex remains confident that it has identified and fixed an error that caused a number of erroneous trades on the platform earlier this week.

On Feb. 12, Poloniex made a decision to reverse all trades that took place during an 11-minute period due to a software error.

Following that, the Poloniex team effectively reversed every trade that had been executed as a result of the bug.

Trade reversal a "Last resort"Arianne Daniel, a product marketing manager at Poloniex, told Cointelegraph that the exchange was able to identify and correct the issue that had caused the error once the platform had shut down for maintenance.

"No customers lost funds as a result of the error. As the error only occurred for customers who placed or executed an order with a clientorderid set during the 11 minutes before we placed our site into maintenance mode, only a very small percentage of our daily active traders were affected by the issue."

"We understand how serious it is to reverse trades and view it as a last resort. Unfortunately, we had to turn to this for the first time, as the error affected too many trades to correct manually."

"It's certainly unconventional. I've never seen a platform have to resort to reversing trades before, and this definitely speaks to the severity of the error."

The reversal of trades may have seemed to be an unorthodox solution to the error on Poloniex's platform, but Greenspan played down the talk of the move setting a dangerous precedent for other trading platforms to follow, saying: "It seems like this was a difficult decision for Poloniex to take, and I applaud them for their transparency in the way they resolved the issue."

"In the technical world that we live in and specifically in the field of online trading, things happen. Bugs and errors are a fact of life and oftentimes, trades can be affected. The difference between good platforms and bad ones is the way that they handle it."

In October 2019, Poloniex broke away from mobile payment giant Circle in order to better serve a global user base of traders.