Gate processed a stock dividend on the wrong perpetual futures contract on Wednesday, applying a $0.33 per-share Franklin Resources payout to a BENUSDT contract that was trading near $0.000585. The mismatch drained margin from short positions and triggered liquidations even though the contract's price barely moved. Roughly 200 accounts were affected.
How a dividend misfired
The error happened at 08:00 UTC. Franklin Resources' dividend was meant to be credited against a stock-linked product. Instead, it landed on the BENUSDT perpetual, whose price reflected a low-value crypto token sharing the same ticker. The $0.33 charge was about 564 times the contract's market price, so short sellers were wiped out by an accounting entry rather than a price move.
One screenshot posted on X by user @SmallPig0526 showed an account at negative $1.46 million.
Gate says it will eat the loss
Godot, Gate's community program lead, said the exchange found and fixed the problem within minutes and will absorb the full loss. He said all users incurred no losses, that Gate bears full responsibility, and that balance display issues are being resolved progressively.
The exchange has not published a detailed incident report and has not said how it will handle credits paid to long positions. It also has not confirmed whether any of those outsized credits were withdrawn.
An awkward time for stock products
The glitch lands as Gate leans harder into stock-linked offerings. The exchange added Japanese stock trading in August, and the broader market has been warming to tokenized equities — the NYSE recently signed a deal to bring tokenized US stocks to crypto users.
Gate blamed the error on two assets sharing one name. That explanation covers the cause but not the controls that let a stock dividend route into a crypto perpetual in the first place. A postmortem would normally spell out which checks failed and what changes follow. So far, there isn't one.
For now, the open questions are narrow and concrete: whether long-side credits get clawed back, how quickly the negative balances shown in user accounts are corrected, and whether Gate publishes the incident report it has so far skipped.
