David Gerard, author of *Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts* wrote up an article on the OKEx $415M+ margin trading disaster. I think it’s a fairly good summary of the what went down and what OKEx is (not) doing about it.
Article URL: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/08/09/the-okex-margin-trading-disaster-doing-what-crypto-margin-trading-usually-does/
From the article:
>The price of Bitcoin dropped 7% on Tuesday 31 July — and a large margin trade on Hong Kong’s OKEx cryptocurrency exchange went so badly that the trader not only blew their margin, they lost more money on the trade than they had put up as collateral.
>(…)
>
> **Obvious questions and comparisons:**
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> There are a number of obvious questions:
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> * How did an order this size go through?
> * OKEx’s terms of service for futures trading note that they can freeze accounts and liquidate positions as needed. Why didn’t they?
> * What customer is so important to OKEx that they’ll risk them breaking the system before they act?
>
> It’s worth noting that we don’t know anything about this customer. We don’t have evidence they … exist. I mean, they probably do! I don’t really think OKEx is defrauding people in this manner. We just have no evidence that this isn’t OKEx applying a haircut to their customers. That’s what “unregulated” means.
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How is BitMEX different from OKEx in term of margin trading disaster?
Have you read… anything about OKEX’s response? They socialized the losses just as their terms dictate.
> We just have no evidence that this isn’t OKEx applying a haircut to their customers.
We actually know precisely what they did.
> That’s what “unregulated” means.
That’s not what unregulated means.
>> * OKEx’s terms of service for futures trading note that they can freeze accounts and liquidate positions as needed. Why didn’t they?
Their terms of service also clearly state how socialized losses work. They both froze his account and socialized losses. And injected a large portion of their own bitcoins into the insurance fund so as to reduce these socialized losses from 40% to 17%.
>> * What customer is so important to OKEx that they’ll risk them breaking the system before they act?
System doesn’t appear to be broken?