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The largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange in South Korea, Upbit, has apparently temporarily stopped deposits and withdrawals after mistaking a phony Aptos (APT) token for a real one.
Official Announcement –
According to an official announcement released on Upbit’s Customer Service Centre webpage, the freeze was initiated on Sunday after Upbit identified an “abnormal deposit attempt” while keeping track of APT movements into and out of its wallet system.
What Went Wrong –
Although account services have been resumed after the suspension, Upbit has issued a warning to the customers that there’s a possibility of price variations when engaging with other exchanges through Upbit. Different cryptocurrency exchanges can show price variations on the same cryptocurrency. Since Upbit has now frozen its transaction system, the syncing can be delayed, and price differences of the same cryptocurrency may vary between exchanges.
As per Upbit’s announcement, Upbit has clearly stated that there may be a severe or drastic price change when APT deposits and withdrawals are resumed. The firm asked the customers to pay “special attention” to the price variations with other exchanges till the time APT transactions are frozen in Upbit.
What Others Had to Say –
Twitter user Definalist criticized the incident. Beginning his X post with “Amazing Korean exchange upbit incident today”. In his post, Definalist speaks of the root of Upbit’s issue that arose because of a blunderous system flaw that misinterpreted a set of airdropped scam tokens as real ATP. According to the user, the only explanation is that Upbit’s wallet system just examined the kind and data and handled deposits and withdrawals.
Definalist claimed that had the con developers written the code to add two more decimals and increase the amount of airdropped to $25,000 per token instead of about $250, the affected accounts might have been much worse. He says that if the fraudulent token contained an 8th decimal place, all users would have received $25,000 instead of $250, which would have caused thousands of users to sell $25,000 worth of APT.
According to an investigation by MingMingBBS that was posted by the Twitter account Definalist, UpBit’s system reportedly mistakenly detected the fake tokens as real ones due to a typo in the code.
According to Coingecko data, the APT token currently ranks 38th in terms of market capitalization with a little over $1.2 billion and daily trading volumes of over $107 million.