Binance Pays $283M to Users After Temporary Depeg Hits USDe, BNSOL, and WBETH
- Binance will compensate users for losses caused by Friday’s platform disruptions that led to extreme price drops in wrapped assets like wBETH, BNBSOL, and USDe.
- The disruptions were caused by infrastructure stress during the recent massive market crash and liquidations, which blocked market makers and impaired cross-venue arbitrage.
- Binance has shifted wrapped-asset valuation to use conversion-ratio pricing instead of distressed spot prices to stabilise valuations during market stress.
Binance will compensate users for losses caused by Friday’s platform disruptions that drove extreme dislocations in wrapped beacon ether (wBETH), Binance Staked SOL (BNBSOL), and Ethena’s synthetic dollar USDe.
That’s according to Yi He, Binance co-founder and chief customer officer, who said all affected users should contact customer support, and that claims will be reviewed case by case. Of course, losses due to market moves and unrealised profits are excluded.
wBETH fell to as low as US$430 (AU$678.11) around 21:40 UTC on Friday, an 88% discount to ETH’s spot price above US$3,800 (AU$5,992.60). BNBSOL dropped to US$34.90 (AU$55.04). USDe slid to US$0.65 (AU$1.03).
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A Massive Test For Crypto Infrastructure
As we all know by now, the crypto market suffered a massive crash on October 10, its biggest meltdown in history that erased over US$500 billion (AU$769 billion) and over US$19 billion (AU$29 billion) in liquidations. Some even reported that losses amounted to nearly US$1 trillion (AU$1.54 trillion).
Makes sense then that the dislocations stemmed from infrastructure stress during heightened volatility and liquidations, which blocked market makers and arbitrageurs from accessing primary markets and executing hedges. With typical cross-venue arbitrage impaired, price alignment broke and wrapped assets decoupled from their underlyings.
As AltLayer founder YQ Jia noted on X, when participants cannot see or hedge on Binance, which accounts for a large share of global spot volume, they pull bids, creating a liquidity vacuum and procyclical downside.
Binance has shifted wrapped-asset valuation to conversion-ratio pricing within 24 hours of the event. wBETH will now be priced by its staking conversion ratio, the actual ETH per token, instead of distressed spot prints.
The change is intended to stabilise wrapped-asset valuations during market stress by anchoring them to underlying entitlement rather than short-term exchange volatility.
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