Aster reimburses traders after XPL perpetual pair glitch sparks forced liquidations

Aster, the decentralized perpetuals exchange backed by Changpeng Zhao-linked YZi Labs, has compensated traders impacted by an abnormal price movement in its XPL perpetual contract, the newly-launched token of the stablecoin-focused Layer 1 Plasma.

The issue occurred at around 11 p.m. UTC on Thursday, with the price of XPL surging to more than $4 from around the $1.30 level witnessed on other exchanges. "We are aware of abnormal price movements on the XPL perpetual trading pair. Rest assured, all user funds are SAFU. We are conducting a full review and will compensate any affected users for losses," Aster posted to X at the time.

Within an hour, Aster confirmed that the issue had been resolved and that all users who were liquidated during the incident would have their losses calculated and reimbursed in USDT, sent directly to their wallets. The liquidation compensation was distributed within three hours, according to the project, followed by a subsequent round of compensation to cover related trading and liquidation fees.

Some community members speculated that the anomaly was linked to an operational oversight during the transition of Aster's XPL market from pre-launch to live trading. They alleged Aster had implemented safeguards by hardcoding the index price at $1 and capping the mark price at $1.22 during testing. When those controls were lifted without aligning the system to the real-time market price, the contract briefly spiked, triggering liquidations before snapping back, users said. Aster has not publicly confirmed these details but continues to investigate, with further updates expected to be shared.

The total value of liquidations compensated due to the incident is unknown, though users estimated this ran into the millions of dollars. The Block reached out to Aster for clarification on the amount involved and for further comment.

Plasma's mainnet launch and Aster's rapid growth

The incident followed Plasma's mainnet launch and debut of its native XPL token earlier on Thursday. The network debuted with over $2 billion in stablecoin total value locked, placing Plasma among the top 10 largest blockchains by stablecoin liquidity at launch, while XPL swiftly reached a fully diluted valuation of over $12 billion .

It also follows a period of rapid growth for Aster, quickly rising as a contender to Hyperliquid in the perpetual DEX sector. Following its token launch on Sept. 17, Aster's ASTER token surged from a fully diluted valuation of $560 million at generation to over $15 billion in days. The DEX recently overtook Hyperliquid in daily perpetuals trading volume, with September flows expected to set new records.

Beyond the typical high leverage and multi-chain features commonly seen in other perp DEXs, Aster's main differentiator is its "hidden orders" feature that lets users place fully "invisible" limit orders on the orderbook, unlike the transparent, fully visible nature of most onchain perp DEXs.