Bitcoin experienced a dramatic incident on the decentralized perpetual futures exchange Paradex early Sunday, briefly trading at what appeared to be zero dollars. This bizarre occurrence followed a technical failure during scheduled maintenance, leading to mass liquidations that prompted the Paradex team to announce a rare chain rollback.
The event unfolded after Paradex conducted database maintenance at around 4:30 a.m. London time. Almost immediately, traders reported that prices for significant cryptocurrencies—including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana—dropped to near-zero levels. Screenshots and videos shared on social media captured a surge of liquidation alerts across the platform, indicating a potential malfunction in the exchange’s pricing mechanisms or oracle feed during the update.
The most chaotic period of the incident occurred around 05:02 UTC on January 19, 2026. During this narrow window, multiple long positions across various markets were liquidated at a price of $0.00. While many long positions for Bitcoin saw liquidations at this null price, some short positions remained unaffected, closing at normal market prices near $92,600. This discrepancy pointed towards an issue that disproportionately impacted one side of the order book, hastening the liquidation process for leveraged positions, which closed automatically to prevent negative balances.
Approximately three hours following the event, Clement Ho, Paradex’s director of engineering, communicated with users on Telegram, confirming the identification of the issue and the decision to revert the chain state to block 1,604,710, timestamped at 04:27:54 UTC. This block represented the last verified state of the blockchain prior to the maintenance activities.
Paradex later reiterated this communication on its website, detailing ongoing recovery efforts and assuring users that all funds remained secure. The described rollback process entails resetting the blockchain and its associated state to a point before the problematic transactions occurred. Consequently, all trades, deposits, and liquidations executed post the specified block would essentially be nullified. Though this action might restore improperly liquidated users’ positions, any profits accrued after the rollback time would also be removed. Such rollbacks are generally viewed as a last resort in decentralized systems, as they challenge the foundational principle of immutability inherent in blockchain technology.
After the outage, Paradex noted a platform-wide service disruption affecting its trading interface, APIs, blockchain components, bridge, and block explorer. In line with its recovery strategy, the exchange indicated it would be force-canceling all open orders, with the exception of take-profit and stop-loss orders. Later updates confirmed that the platform’s services and vault withdrawals were reinstated, although deposits and withdrawals related to Gigavault would remain paused for up to 24 hours.
The team also issued warnings regarding fake support accounts impersonating Paradex staff during this tumultuous period, advising users to rely solely on official communication channels for updates and support. They underscored that no Paradex staff member would ask for private keys, and any unsolicited messages from other accounts constituted a scam.
This incident has intensified scrutiny surrounding the technical vulnerabilities present in on-chain derivatives markets, particularly as these platforms have dealt with a series of disruptions in recent months. Aster, another leading perpetual exchange, has faced challenges as well, suffering losses due to sophisticated trading strategies, including a notable issue that arose in September following an abnormal price spike in its XPL perpetual contract.
