Japanese crypto exchanges are on fire these days. After Coincheck lost $400 million of crypto coins to hackers, for which it is going to face a lawsuit, another Japanese crypto exchange has come under scrutiny quite recently. A crypto exchange popular in Japan, Zaif has recently revealed that its customers were able to buy trillions of dollars worth of Bitcoin for free. A local media outlet in the country has reported that the exchange encountered a “system glitch” which moved the price of the virtual currency to 0 yens per coin.
The exchange informed the users about the malfunction in a blog post on their website on Tuesday. The company explained that on February 16 during a time of 18 minutes, the users had the option to trade fiat money for Bitcoin at a rate of 0 Yen. According to an official statement by the company,
“[…] A problem occurred in the price calculation system on our simple service “simple trading”, the situation occurred where we could buy and sell the virtual currency at zero yen, and along with that, board information We sincerely apologize for the extraordinary worry and inconvenience caused by our customers regarding the abnormal value.”
The reports from other trusted news sources claim that some users have purchased Bitcoin for free and one particular buyer tried to purchase Bitcoins worth $20 trillion for free and then attempted to sell them on the same platform, as well. Fortunately, the exchange was able to stop the transactions and recover what would have been massive losses. As the company clarified later,
“In response to the system malfunction, the immediate response was started from the occurrence of the problem and correction was implemented. After that, it is operating normally.”
Although, the exchange was quick enough to solve the issue, yet this has caused mistrust in users towards the exchange. The users are now complaining about lack of customer support and slow performances of the exchange. Currently, Japan is going through a period of scrutiny in which the regulators firmly keep an eye on every exchange.
