For nearly a year, ZachXBT has been telling anyone who’d listen that centralized exchanges have the power to actually punish market manipulators instead of just watching from the sidelines.
Now a claim that started circulating on crypto Twitter has been followed by something rarer: Bitget’s own official account confirming, in its own words, that a compensation plan is actually happening. I’ve followed this saga closely enough to know why that confirmation, even in its current limited form, is worth taking seriously.
The Claim That Started Circulating On Crypto Twitter
The story started with a post from crypto researcher CryptoBraveHQ, alleging that Bitget had risk-controlled a trading account tied to manipulation, confiscated the improper profits sitting inside it, and used those confiscated funds to directly compensate affected users.
What struck me most about the framing wasn’t just the confiscation itself, it was the sequencing described. According to the claim, the funds weren’t simply frozen and left sitting in limbo pending some future review, they were reportedly redistributed to affected users immediately, closing off nearly every avenue market makers typically use to eventually recover disputed funds.
Bitget’s Own Statement Confirms A Compensation Plan Is Real
Here’s the update that changes the shape of this story. Bitget’s official Chinese-language account posted directly about the incident, confirming that on August 9, 2026, three contracts, $TUTUSDT, $LOBSTER, and$BICOUSDT, experienced abnormal price fluctuations that caused severe liquidity imbalances, briefly pushing the mark price away from the broader market and triggering forced liquidations on certain short positions.
According to Bitget’s own wording, the exchange has formulated a compensation plan covering users whose short positions were forcibly liquidated during the affected window due to the abnormal mark prices, applying to anyone with an eligible liquidation record across any of the three contracts. The exchange explicitly excluded users who violated its terms of use or applicable laws, or who actively opened new positions during the fluctuation window itself, from the compensation scope.
For calculating payouts, Bitget said it would use the fair market price at 15:00 UTC+8 on August 9, roughly ten minutes before the abnormal fluctuations began, specifically to protect user interests in the benchmark calculation. Eligible users are instructed to contact official customer service or their VIP account manager directly to register, verify, and receive compensation in USDT.
Connecting The Statement Back To The Original Claim
I think the detail worth sitting with here is that TUT is directly named in Bitget’s own statement, and TUT was also the exact token referenced in the original claim that kicked off this whole story. That’s a meaningful overlap. It doesn’t confirm every specific detail from the original post, Bitget’s statement frames this as a response to abnormal price fluctuations and liquidity imbalances triggering forced liquidations, rather than explicitly describing a market maker’s account being risk-controlled and its profits confiscated in those exact terms. But the underlying shape of the story lines up: something unusual happened with TUT trading, Bitget intervened, and a compensation plan for affected users followed.
Zachxbt’s Response, And The Pattern Behind It
ZachXBT’s own reaction to the original claim was notably measured rather than a full endorsement. He said it would be genuinely interesting if Bitget had actually done this, adding that he’d publicly suggested exchanges start taking exactly this kind of action a while back specifically regarding LAB.
What makes that response worth understanding in context is how long he’s been pushing this exact idea. Back in May, replying to a discussion involving Bitget CEO Gracy Chen, he wrote that centralized exchanges need to freeze market maker profits and distribute them to victims, adding that the system shouldn’t have to rely on outside researchers publicly calling this out for it to happen.
A week later, in a longer thread laying out the imbalance of information between insiders and retail traders, he directly named Bitget, Binance, and Gate.io, urging them to freeze insider profits and redistribute them to users, or delist troubled tokens entirely rather than waiting for public pressure to force their hand.
Why The TUT Case Is Different From LAB, And Why That Matters
I think it’s important to be precise about what Bitget’s confirmed statement actually covers, because it isn’t quite the same situation ZachXBT has spent months campaigning about.
The LAB saga involved allegations of sustained, insider-coordinated supply manipulation, opaque OTC loans, unilateral vesting changes, and roughly 226 million tokens funneled through Bitget-linked wallets over weeks. Bitget’s official TUT statement, by contrast, describes a shorter, sharper liquidity and mark-price event triggering forced liquidations, closer in shape to the kind of abnormal trading incident the exchange has compensated for before, such as the VOXEL perpetual futures episode back in April 2025.
That distinction matters, but I don’t think it makes the TUT confirmation any less relevant to the broader conversation ZachXBT has been driving. Whether this specific case involved confiscating a manipulator’s profits directly, as the original claim described, or resulted from Bitget’s own risk-control systems catching an abnormal liquidity event and choosing to compensate affected users regardless of the underlying cause, the outcome lands in the same place he’s been asking exchanges to reach: proactively protecting retail users from losses tied to abnormal market conditions rather than leaving them to absorb the damage.
What This Confirmation Actually Tells Us Going Forward
Reading Bitget’s own statement alongside everything ZachXBT has published over the past several months, I think the honest read is this: the exchange has confirmed real compensation is happening for a real incident involving one of the exact tokens named in the original claim, which is a meaningfully stronger signal than an unverified social media post on its own.
What remains genuinely unconfirmed is whether this reflects the specific confiscate-and-redistribute mechanism described in the original post, since Bitget’s own language frames it through the lens of abnormal fluctuations and liquidation rollback rather than explicitly seizing a manipulator’s trading profits. Given how much scrutiny Bitget has faced over its handling of LAB specifically, I’d treat this as a genuinely encouraging data point that the exchange is willing to compensate users proactively, while still watching closely for whether that same posture extends to the harder, murkier cases involving alleged insider coordination rather than straightforward liquidity events.
Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any services. Follow us on X @nulltxnews
Be the first to comment