Official Statement
Incident 2021/05/19
We are making an official statement regarding what happened yesterday (2021/05/19). As many of you know, yesterday, Bitcoin dropped to $28,8k in a short time. It is a correction that many people were expecting, and was, probably, accelerated due to other news.
Only Bitcoin moved more than $40B volume in Binance Futures, and around $200B between all the markets. Many exchanges experienced this spike in volume:
And many of them had problems handling it, which was translated to errors in the API.
One month before, we had a similar situation (April 18th), which was even worse due to a DDoS attack that we suffered a few hours before the crash. Many services suffered significant losses, and some of them were even liquidated. We took responsibility, and we covered the losses of several profit-sharing services liquidated because of our fault.
In April’s incident, we did a couple of things poorly, first communication, and for sure don’t handle the DDoS attack properly. We keep the entire community informed by email, Telegram, Discord, and inside the app during yesterday’s incident. We followed a communication procedure created by our project manager after April’s incident, which I think worked pretty well.
Regarding the platform malfunction, we were affected for sure; if there is no communication with the exchanges, Zignaly doesn’t work. It’s that simple. Yesterday, the problem was with the streams connections and also with some REST APIs. There was also something related to the leverage tokens in the spot market. And withdrawals were temporarily suspended for ERC20 tokens.
Some traders reported that after clicking on the “exit” button, the positions weren’t sold and remained in the dashboard.
Thinking that the orders weren’t working either, we stopped creating new positions and temporarily disabled the disconnections and withdrawals from profit-sharing until we were sure about what was happening.
After investigating why the exit orders weren’t working, we discovered that the positions that were failing to exit were already liquidated, some of them more than 5 hours before the trader clicked the “exit” button. Everything in our system work with signals, even when you click “exit,” that’s transformed into a signal and stored:
When we close a position, we use the date/time of the last trade that filled the position as the closing date:
That’s why we can recreate exactly what happened (either by a signal sent to the endpoint, from TradingView, algo-bots, or by manually in the trading terminal).
The problem that we had, was due to the delay from the stream connections, we weren’t able to update the statuses of positions liquidated, which gave the impression that they were still opened and there was something to save. But the positions were already liquidated.
We understand the community thinking that it was Zignaly’s fault. It doesn’t matter if it’s because of a DDoS attack, a problem with the exchanges’ API, or whatever, in the end, is Zignaly the one handling everything. It happened before and could have been this time too. We really appreciate our traders, who after explaining the problem, they have clarified the situation:
Hyper Dip Scalper:
Delta:
I’m pretty sure that they’ll take enough actions to prevent this from happening again.
Some users are demanding the stop-loss to be placed in the exchange in advance as a solution to yesterday’s incident. We plan to do it, and we’ll look for a way to accelerate it. However, many services work with dynamic stop-losses, generated automatically as part of their strategies, usually triggered by indicators based on price updates. Yesterday, most of the tools (even some exchanges and TradingView) were having problems updating prices; if the price update is missing, there is no way to trigger the stop-loss.
We haven’t finished with the problem of the services liquidated, but not updated. They already liquidated and there is no balance on them, but because we haven’t updated the status yet, some users still appear with a positive balance. It doesn’t matter much because there is no balance to do withdraws but still will fix it during the week.
I’m sad that we have lost more of the profits that have been generated for the last 6 months (since we launched profit-sharing), but on the other hand, we have survived the worst crash since we launched profit-sharing, and we are still positive. I’m sure that many traders will become strongest from this situation and also, that we, retail investors, will evaluate better our decisions when composing our portfolio.
There were services that yesterday did profits:
