Gate.io forced a surprise service outage on its users today. The giant crypto exchange, which claims to have processed over $4 billion in spot plus $17 billion in derivative volume over the last 24 hours despite the outage, partially apologized for the shutdown and promised to compensate users in the most confusing way possible.
In an announcement, the exchange apologized “for any inconvenience caused” via a post on X. Executives then hyperlinked to a legal disclaimer that clarified, “We will provide 100% compensation for all customer losses incurred during the upgrade (excluding market factors).”
Because a centralized exchange customer usually only has two ways to lose money — market price movements or outright theft — this language made it unclear what compensation was actually offered.
The announcement prompted an AMA to “see exactly how payouts work.” Customers flooded into the space to ask what it means, exactly, for Gate.io to compensate users for losses “excluding market factors.”
Read more: ‘Someone is trying to ruin my Friday’ says Gate.io CEO after hack rumors
A social audio space on X began in Mandarin, providing no context for English-speaking users, and then ended abruptly with no answer to the question. Soon, another space started, also in Mandarin.
Gate.io’s chief business officer hasn’t clarified the terms of how the company will compensate for losses via a written X post as of publication time.
Protos has reached out to Gate.io for comment and will update this post if we receive a reply.
