Dialogue with Bitget's high-frequency market maker: "All the money is earned by skill", the first restoration of the entire process of VOXEL's $43 million "profit"

The market maker qntxxx in the VOXEL incident was interviewed by Wu Shuo. He said that he made a profit of 43 million US dollars through 100 sub-accounts, with about 10 million US dollars withdrawn, and Binance froze hundreds of thousands of US dollars. He said he would not compromise and had hired a lawyer. He believed that trading was based on the principle of fair trading, rather than deliberately finding loopholes to attack BG's server, so this part of the profit (43 million US dollars) should belong to their team.

Bitget responded: The professional wool interest groups suspected to be associated with these 8 accounts are the main initiators of this VOXEL incident and have improperly gained more than 20 million US dollars. Bitget will distribute 100% of the recovered funds to platform users in the form of airdrops. In addition to these 8 accounts, all other retail users who participated in VOXEL transactions from 16:00 to 16:30 on April 20 and have withdrawn cash (about 19 million US dollars) have returned to normal on Wednesday, and will not be held accountable in the future.

Below is an interview with the accused market maker:

Colin Wu: First, could you please introduce your history?

qntxxx: There are two people in our team. We started to join the cryptocurrency circle to do high-frequency trading in early 2022. But we may not have done well until the Luna crash. We were a contract market maker on Binance at that time, and made a profit of more than 1 million US dollars. Then we continued to make markets on Binance until the beginning of 2024. In November last year, we began to try to make markets on smaller exchanges such as Bitget and Gate.

Colin Wu: Didn’t BG allow external market makers for contracts before?

qntxxx: There is no absolute answer. Its spot liquidity is not very good, so if you want to apply for a contract market maker, you must also apply for its spot market maker. We have been doing this since November 2024. There is an application portal on its official website. Whether it is an individual or an institution, you can apply for a market maker, and the threshold for passing is also very low, and only requires some proof of trading volume from other exchanges.

Colin Wu: Back to the core question, how did you discover this opportunity that day and what strategy did you adopt?

qntxxx: When the market is not volatile, you can think of it as sideways. Our strategy is to place many targets at the same time, that is, to make many contracts at the same time. But if a certain coin suddenly rises and falls sharply, this is the most suitable scenario for us to make profits from high-frequency trading, so in this scenario, we need to seize the opportunity, and then increase the order amount and the number of sub-accounts for a transaction.

qntxxx: At that time, we also paid attention to the coin VOXEL, and its trading volume was already quite large, so we also traded this coin. But suddenly we found that its profit was magnified, so we also increased the number of trading sub-accounts, about more than 100.

qntxxx: A similar situation happened in the Luna incident. At that time, we also traded hundreds of accounts at the same time. This time is actually a similar incident to Luna. There was also a situation where the upper and lower K-lines were randomly hitting each other in its market. The K-lines during that period were very consistent with the profit scenario of our strategy, so we made a profit of 43 million US dollars.

Colin Wu: BG said that there are 20 million US dollars outstanding, so are there other market makers?

qntxxx: In the end, we withdrew about 10 million US dollars, and Binance froze hundreds of thousands of US dollars. There must be other market makers, but the time window was also short. Two of the 9 lawyers' letters were sent to us, and we don't know who the others were from, but I think the total amount withdrawn should be more than 20 million US dollars.

(BG responded: Before the risk control measures took effect, the abnormal profit withdrawn from the platform was 38.31 million USDT. Except for the abnormal profit of about 20 million USDT involved in the 8 accounts mentioned above, the other withdrawn funds will never be pursued)

There were only two of us managing three accounts. At that time, the trading volume on the market increased dramatically, which lasted for more than half an hour, and the currency had not yet triggered risk control, such as stopping trading. The accounts that made profits were first frozen, but after two hours, withdrawals were restored, and even that night and the next day.

qntxxx: I think the essence of this matter is that the market maker within BG lost to us in terms of the market price. I think this is in line with the principle of fair trading. We trade based on the market price, rather than deliberately finding loopholes or attacking BG's servers. We trade fairly, so I think our part of the profit (43 million US dollars) should all belong to us.

Colin Wu: BG sent you a lawyer's letter. Have you consulted a lawyer so far? Have you consulted on related matters?

qntxxx: Yes, the lawyer suggested that we sue their Singapore entity because they made arbitrary deductions. When they rolled back transactions, many ordinary users' bills were messed up, and even financial management was deducted from you first. After the first wave of rollbacks, many users reported that their bills did not match because the exchange also included the handling fee and deducted more money from users.

(BG response: The principle of rollback is to correct abnormal profits and losses, so users' principal and handling fees will not be lost. After the rollback was completed, we found that some users' handling fees were wrongly deducted. The handling fees of the relevant accounts have been refunded. No user suffered any loss of principal or handling fees in this incident.)

Colin Wu: There is also a view that if this is an exploitation of a bug in the exchange, similar to some bank bugs, for example, a bank inexplicably over-transferred millions to a person, then the law may require the money to be returned.

qntxxx: Our claim is this. BG has not admitted to the outside world that it has participated in the counterparty transactions with users, that is, it has not admitted that they are an official contract market maker. First of all, the majority of users assume that it is only responsible for matching, matching our transactions between buyers and sellers. What we earn is the money lost to us by others. The trading volume of the market is real, and our pending orders are also normal. It is not that there are some loopholes. There are indeed people who lose money to us on the market. However, if it claims that it is its own loophole, then it needs to produce evidence. It makes no sense to unilaterally accuse us of exploiting its loophole.

If he thinks this is a real loophole and the money in our account was caused by their bug, then these transactions should not really exist.

They claim that we stole money, which is unreasonable. We actually made profits normally and then withdrew the money. It is not that we hacked into their exchange wallets, and their risk control and audit teams did not stop us from withdrawing money.

(BG response: We will release the accident report as soon as possible to restore the truth. Regarding whether the crime of theft is suspected, there are also past cases for reference, such as the case in Maoming City, Guangdong in 2015, case number: (2015) Maonan Faxingchu No. 112)