It’s like shooting yourself in the foot with computer code, then magically going back in time to before it happened.
Crypto exchange Poloniex confirmed in a series of tweets today that it rescinded 12 minutes of trading history in response to a software problem that saw a bunch of trades execute “erroneously.” The Twitter announcement did not elaborate on the specific nature of these errors, but the exchange’s perceived technical problems are not the interesting bit here.
It’s how Poloniex handled the situation: wiping every trade made between 17:53 UTC and 18:05 UTC today after its automated audits detected the problem. The company also canceled any pending withdrawals, and every affected customer was informed of this via email.
A Poloniex spokesperson was not immediately available for comment — we don’t know how many users were actually affected or what kind of trading volume was nullified by this decision.