The meme coin project Floki launched its new sister token TOKEN at 11:10 pm on October 27th, but the exchange Bitget opened the market on the chain first and subsequently prevented users from withdrawing their tokens. Today (31st), Bitget officials finally responded, saying they would remove the TOKEN trading pair.

Floki, a meme coin project with the same name as Musk's pet dog, launched its new sister token TOKEN at 11:10 p.m. last Friday, October 27. Amid the market's eager anticipation, on-chain transactions soared 600 times from the opening price of $0.00005, once rising to $0.03. The sales performance was quite impressive.

Open for trading but no withdrawals allowed, token price plummets

However, what was unexpected was that the project party originally planned to open the contract trading at 11 o'clock, but it was accidentally postponed to 11:10. However, the exchange Bitget took the lead and launched the TOKEN trading pair in advance.

Since most users in the market were mainly focused on buying on the chain during the initial opening period, they had not yet noticed that the exchange Bitget had opened trading pairs, making the price on Bitget much lower than the price on the chain. In this case, users who bought TOKEN from Bitget can take advantage of the price difference in the early stage to buy TOKEN at a low price, and then sell it on the Defi exchange to achieve low buy and high sell!

Unexpectedly, not long after, users on Bitget found that they were unable to withdraw their tokens after purchasing spot TOKENs. This phenomenon was immediately interpreted by the community as Bitget actually not holding spot TOKENs at all, causing the price of TOKENs on Bitget to plummet, at one point differing by more than 3.5 times from the on-chain price.

Bitget price (left) on-chain price (right)｜Source: Community

Bitget directly delists trading pairs

The situation of being unable to withdraw tokens has lasted for several days. Many users are closely watching Bitget's subsequent handling methods. During the process, we also saw that Bitget's X account kept coming out to ease the situation, saying that the withdrawal of TOKENs will be opened as soon as possible.

Until this afternoon (31st), Bitget finally issued an announcement in response, stating that because the Floki project party manipulated the market price by maliciously compressing liquidity, after comprehensive evaluation and consideration, Bitget will decide to delist the TOKEN and launch a repurchase plan for Bitget users holding the token. The specific arrangements are as follows:

  • Bitget has suspended the deposit and trading services of TokenFi (TOKEN) tokens at 16:00 (UTC+8) on October 31, 2023, and cancelled all entrustment orders;

  • Bitget will repurchase TokenFi (TOKEN) tokens before 16:00 (UTC+8) on November 7, 2023, based on the highest closing price of TokenFi (TOKEN) tokens on Bitget within 5 days of opening for trading (October 27 to October 31), that is, 1 TOKEN = 0.00605002 USDT.

  • To simplify user operations, Bitget will uniformly exchange the TOKEN tokens in the user's account into USDT at the repurchase price before the agreed time.

Ignite the anger of the community, and scolding is just "selling air"

After the announcement was released, the anger of the community was instantly ignited. Many users believed that Bitget's move proved that it did not have any spot TOKEN at all. What was bought and sold on the exchange was not cryptocurrency at all, but Bitget's data, which was pure "air trading". They were very disappointed with the subsequent handling of the Bitget exchange.

The community is full of criticism