Elon Musk prompts Binance to disclose details of Dogecoin old-transaction glitch

The cryptocurrency exchange Binance said it is addressing the problem of customer withdrawals affected by a glitch in old Dogecoin (DOGE) transactions, but it will take about another week. The company published the statement after the incident drew the attention of Elon Musk.

(Thread) An update on the issue we’re having with $DOGE withdrawals:

The root cause is a technical issue during the recent upgrade process that caused old transactions to be resent to 1,674 users.

— Binance (@binance) November 23, 2021

On 10 November, as a result of a software upgrade glitch, Binance repeated an unknown number of user DOGE transactions made years ago. After the funds left the exchange’s cold wallet to third-party accounts, the platform demanded that the senders of the original transactions reimburse losses at the current rate and blocked their balances.

The incident drew the attention of Elon Musk. On 23 November the entrepreneur addressed Binance’s chief:

“Hey, Changpeng Zhao, what’s going on with your DOGE holders? Sounds shady.”

Hey @cz_binance, what’s going on with your Doge customers? Sounds shady.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2021

In response to Musk’s post, the company publicly disclosed details of what happened.

According to Binance, the cause lay in the technical configuration of the DOGE wallet. Addressing the issue will require the platform’s staff “a week or so.” Dogecoin developers are assisting. The incident affected 1,674 customers.

“This is a long and complex process, but the team is working around the clock. We understand that users who received old transactions, and users who cannot withdraw DOGE, are upset — and rightly so. We have politely asked those who received erroneous transfers to return them, but we know some users are having trouble accessing certain wallets,” the statement said.

In response, the head of Tesla noted that Binance DOGE holders should be protected from errors that are not their fault.

Doge holders using Binance should be protected from errors that are not their fault

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2021

CZ himself joined the discussion, noting that Tesla also experiences software failures that threaten user safety.

Elon, we are pretty certain it is an issue with the latest #doge wallet. We are in communications with the devs. Apologies for any inconvenience that may have caused you.

What happened here? 👀https://t.co/g2J50zqbEu

— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) November 23, 2021

“Elon, we are pretty sure this is a problem with the latest DOGE wallet version. We are in touch with the developers. Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you. What happened?”

Analyst The Block Larry Cermak suggested that “CZ will call this FUD and block Elon.” In the next tweet he mocked Zhao and Musk’s exchange.

And just like this, we have a $300B+ dick measuring contest pic.twitter.com/yimZpN152o

— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) November 23, 2021

Two affected users told ForkLog that the exchange had unlocked their dashboards. The situation also improved for about eight participants in a Telegram chat created after the incident.

“There were 30 people in the group. In that time about 10 people were unlocked, give or take. I was among those lucky ones. I have no idea by what principle they unlocked them,” ForkLog trader Dmitry said in an interview.

He added that the affected users via Reddit reached out to one of the Dogecoin developers. Subsequently, that developer personally investigated the details with Binance users who had been blocked.

As a reminder, in late October on the Binance.US platform Bitcoin price in a minute fell by 87%, to $8200. The price drop was linked to a software error in one institutional client’s trading algorithm — the algorithm failed.

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