Timeline: September 25, 2025 evening
That day, Plasma's native token $XPL was trading on multiple markets, and around 23:00 UTC that evening, the price of the XPL perpetual contract on the decentralized derivatives exchange Aster DEX suddenly skyrocketed from $1.30 to nearly $4.
But the problem is:
In other exchanges or spot markets, the price of XPL is still around $1.30.
This led to an absurd result — traders holding perpetual contracts on Aster were automatically liquidated, suffering heavy losses, because the contract system believed the price had truly skyrocketed, rather than being a system error.
Many users vented about this 'super blunder' on social media, and the community jokingly referred to it as:
"XPL experienced a roller coaster, a rocket, and a blunder trilogy in one day."
⚠️ What exactly caused this error?
The core issue is actually very 'programmer logic':
📌 Aster's price index was incorrectly set to a fixed $1;
📌 The exchange also set a price cap (mark price cap) of about $1.22;
📌 However, when the team went live, they removed this price cap in advance without first correcting the index data—resulting in the price 'disappearing' and rapidly soaring under the contract logic.
In simple terms, it is:
The internal pricing logic is out of sync with real-time market prices, creating a price illusion that triggered the automatic contract liquidation mechanism.
This situation is very sensitive in perpetual contract design:
The contract system does not look directly at the spot market but at the so-called 'mark price' to determine whether liquidation occurs. Once the mark price diverges from the real market price, forced liquidation is inevitable.
💸 Compensation and Consequences
The good news is that Aster quickly took compensation measures:
✔ The platform announced that all affected users would be compensated for their losses in USDT.
✔ The second round of compensation was carried out after the first round was completed, covering transaction fees and forced liquidation fees.
The specific compensation amount has not been disclosed by officials, but community analysis suggests it could be in the millions of dollars.
Shortly after the incident, Aster emphasized that user funds were SAFU (safe), which largely avoided a complete collapse of user trust in the platform.
🤔 Community Response and Subsequent Impact
This incident has sparked considerable discussion within the community:
Some praised Aster for its swift compensation and responsible handling;
Others reminded that even technical platforms cannot overlook the accuracy of fundamental pricing logic and must be particularly cautious with the settings for prediction feeds and indices;
There were also comments joking that this 'price glitch' was more exciting than many people's trading strategies.
