Binance has told a trader who says he lost more than $5 million that its systems worked normally during the AKE liquidations on September 3. The token it liquidated him on is one Binance does not list for spot trading.
The exchange’s support account said AKEUSDT contract pricing and liquidation reference spot prices across the wider network rather than Binance’s own order book, meaning the move originated on venues it does not operate and was transmitted into its contracts market.
Binance Customer Support said in a post on September 3 that the price movement was normal market volatility, appeared consistently across multiple mainstream platforms and on-chain, and was not caused by a pricing anomaly or system failure on its platform.
What Binance Said
The reply, posted from the official support account and translated from Chinese, addressed losses incurred on AKEUSDT contracts during what it described as severe price fluctuations across the entire market at 05:44 on September 3, Beijing time.
Binance said its contracts use the mark price as the basis for forced liquidation rather than the latest transaction price from any single platform and that the mark price references data from multiple markets to reduce the effect of abnormal or extreme prices on liquidations. It said verification found the relevant systems operated normally and characterized the outcome as the ordinary risk of leveraged positions under extreme market conditions.
What the Trader Alleges
The complainant, posting publicly, said he ran funding-rate arbitrage on Binance and that more than thirty positions were force-liquidated at 05:44 on September 3, wiping out substantially all of his principal with losses exceeding 5 million USDT.
He said AKE moved from $0.0076 to $0.044859 over roughly eight hours from the evening of September 2 and doubled from $0.022432 to $0.044859 in the seven minutes to 05:44. He argues that a move of that speed in a low-float token without a fundamental catalyst indicates deliberate short-squeezing rather than ordinary volatility and asks Binance to audit the session, publish its risk-control logs, and disclose the timing, prices, and positions involved in the liquidations.
The Crypto Times has not verified the loss figure, which rests on his own account. The trading history is not public, and Binance’s reply confirms a complaint was made, not its size.
The Price Move
CoinMarketCap data captured at 11:55 UTC on September 3 records AKE at $0.008803 on September 1, $0.01654 on September 2, and $0.01287 on September 3, the last down 22.15% on the day. Its 24-hour chart shows a low near $0.008474, a climb through the evening, a vertical spike just above $0.030 in the early hours, then an immediate collapse to around $0.015 and a drift toward $0.013.
The aggregate spot peak visible in that data sits materially below the $0.044859 the trader cites for the contract. The gap may reflect chart resolution, a difference between futures last-trade prices and an aggregated spot index, or trading on venues outside that index. It is not resolved by the available public data, and it bears directly on Binance’s account that the move originated in spot markets and transmitted into contracts.
The TUT Precedent
The complainant asks Binance to compensate users, as he says it was done after the TUT episode on August 9. Binance issued no public compensation then.
Gate did, covering USDT liquidation losses on TUTUSDT within a four-minute window from 07:10 to 07:14 UTC on August 9 and opening a claim form. Bitget paid roughly $40 million, using each affected user’s account equity at 15:00 as the baseline for shorts liquidated during the mark-price spike. Both remedies were structured narrowly, one by time window and one by equity baseline.
That leaves three exchanges taking three positions on the same class of event: two absorbing losses from a suspected squeeze in a thin token, and Binance treating the outcome as the risk a leveraged trader accepts.
The Manipulation Claim
The complaint cites on-chain analyst EmberCN, whose August 17 post traced a market-maker cluster that it says dumped SIREN, later moved XPIN, and dumped AKE roughly 60% in early July before pumping it around 52-fold from $0.00019 to $0.01 through overlapping wallets.
The Crypto Times has not independently verified those wallet flows and names no party. The complainant also argues the AKE session resembled TUT structurally—low liquidity, small market capitalization, no fundamental catalyst, an extreme one-way move, and liquidations clustered across several platforms.
