Paradex Refunds $650K After Maintenance Bug Triggers Liquidations

Onchain derivatives platform Paradex just dropped $650K back to ~200 users after a maintenance bug went rogue and triggered liquidations across multiple markets. Not a hack — just a classic software screw-up.

According to their Friday post-mortem on X, the chaos hit during a planned 30-minute database upgrade on Monday. A 'race condition' corrupted market data and wrote it onchain. Paradex confirmed it was operational, not a security breach.

Paradex is an onchain derivatives platform where traders can take leveraged perpetual positions without depositing assets on a centralized exchange — you keep control of your funds.

In response, they disabled platform access, canceled all open orders (except take-profit and stop-loss), and rolled back the chain to a snapshot from before maintenance. This was the first-ever rollback of Paradex Chain — 'an undesired but necessary action to protect users and restore network integrity.'

They've now implemented fixes: updated service restart procedures, extra data validation checks, revised scale-up processes for full-downtime maintenance, and price-band protections during post-only trading periods.

This isn't an isolated incident. Recent outages show how operational and infrastructure failures — not hacks — can wreck derivatives trading and crypto market access.

In October, decentralized exchange dYdX paused trading for about eight hours after a code-ordering error and delayed oracle restarts led to mispriced trading and liquidations. They're now voting on compensating affected traders with up to $462K from the protocol's insurance fund.

Even traditional markets aren't immune. In November, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) halted trading for ~10 hours after a cooling failure at a CyrusOne data center in Illinois disrupted operations — traders were not happy.

Internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare also reported an 'internal service degradation' in November. The outage briefly blocked access to front ends of major crypto platforms like Coinbase, Blockchain.com, BitMEX, Ledger, and DefiLlama.