Bitget Pursues Legal Action Against Traders Over $20M Futures Incident

Crypto exchange Bitget is taking legal action against eight account holders it accuses of manipulating the price of VOXEL token perpetual futures, the company announced.

Bitget’s head of Chinese operations, Xie Jiayin, said in a post on X that the exchange will send legal letters to the individuals, who allegedly profited a combined $20 million during the April 20 incident.

“These eight accounts are the main instigators of the VOXEL incident and have improperly gained more than 20 million US dollars from it,” Jiayin wrote. She added that other users who traded VOXEL futures that day and withdrew funds would not face further scrutiny, and their accounts have been fully restored.

Bitget first flagged “abnormal trading activity” on the VOXEL/USDT perpetual futures pair on April 20, after the trading volume surged past $12 billion—far higher than the volume on competing platforms like Binance. The exchange paused several accounts suspected of manipulation and later rolled back irregular trades to recover funds.

CEO Gracy Chen said at the time that the incident involved individual users, not the platform itself, and that user assets remained safe.

Bitget is still investigating the root cause of the trading irregularity. Jiayin said the exchange will airdrop 100% of recovered funds to affected users and plans to release a full incident report.

Some users on X speculated that a malfunctioning market maker bot may have caused the surge in trading volume, allowing savvy traders to exploit the flaw with high-leverage bets.

VOXEL is the utility token of Voxies, a 3D turn-based tactical RPG built on Ethereum.

The Seychelles-based exchange, which claims over 45 million global users, is licensed in Poland and Lithuania. Bitget has recently returned to the United Kingdom market and expanded operations into Vietnam.

The incident echoes a similar event on decentralized exchange Hyperliquid in March, where suspicious trading around the JELLY token led to estimated profits of $6.26 million. Hyperliquid has since delisted JELLY perpetual futures citing market manipulation concerns.