Yet another Binance scandal: a “naive mistake” when processing Helium tokens

So, the Binance dealing, while crediting deposits to the owners of the Helium service token, did not take into consideration (forgot / did not know / was drunk – underline whatever applicable) that Helium ecosystem has two completely different tokens: HNT and MOBILE. Binance erroneously counted the two tokens as one, as users who sent MOBILE tokens to its platform got an equal amount of HNT that is more expensive instead.

The difference in the transferred value was not less than $19 million. And the crypto community behaves quite predictably when receiving such “bonuses”: it immediately rushes to take free “profit” out until the error has been discovered and corrected by the team.

The things look not good. Firstly, Binance is down some 4.8 million HNT tokens that were erroneously disbursed to users, which are now technically extremely difficult to get back. Secondly, even if the illegal beneficiaries agreed to return tokens they have received (and, as we have already understood, they simply have nothing to return), this would still not compensate for the losses incurred; as the result of created pressure from sellers who have received a crazy airdrop, HNT market value sank by more than 40% .

It turns out that those holders who do not cooperate with Binance at all were also affected. Their “HNT” trading portfolio lost half of its value during the day. Such a situation is reminding us that the centralized exchanges have to take the responsibility for such a significant impact on the market.

Furthermore, the fact that the Helium Foundation contacted traders earlier than the crypto exchange is rather important. Binance quickly solved the root of the problem, so it helped to avoid panic among the Helium community.