WazirX steps up to minimise volatile pricing of newly listed crypto tokens

Binance-owned crypto exchange WazirX on Tuesday said it’ll implement measures to minimise volatile pricing of newly listed cryptocurrency tokens as was seen with the unusual spike in prices of ‘meme-coin’ Shiba Inu on its platform last week.

It also announced an Airdrop programme of new WazirX tokens to partially compensate users who suffered losses on account of the SHIB pricing glitch, as reported by ET on May 16th.

The measures taken by WazirX include enabling deposits and withdrawals options of a token at least 1 hour prior to its listing, caution investors about the risks of trading newly listed coins and make prior announcements before any new listing exercise to ensure ample liquidity pool.


“This will help us ensure that anyone can bring in the liquidity for a token and will reduce our reliance on our existing small pool of liquidity providers,” its chief executive Nischal Shetty said in a blog post on Tuesday.


Last week, after getting listed on WazirX, Shiba Inu (SHIB) opened at a much higher price on the exchange than its price across the world. From its peak of Rs 1,660, its price had dipped to below one rupee an hour after the token had listed. This meant that several traders trying to purchase the coin made losses. Many of these traders took to social media to vent their ire.

Shetty called this an “anomaly” acknowledging the error in the blog post. “On May 13, 2021, when we listed SHIB market, its deposits and withdrawals took longer to go live due to an anomaly. There was a temporary demand-supply mismatch which caused SHIB prices to climb up briefly,” said Shetty.

“As soon as our team discovered this anomaly, and turned on SHIB deposits and withdrawals, SHIB price auto-adjusted based on the new deposits coming in from our users. Unfortunately, people who bought SHIB at high price and could not sell it faced losses,” he added.

As compensation, Shetty said that WazirX will now offer free WazirX tokens equivalent to 25% of the losses suffered on account of the error through its Airdrop programme over the next four months.

These tokens will be automatically made available only to those who bought SHIB at exceptionally high price i.e., above Rs 0.0020 and never sold it or bought it at a higher price and sold it after prices normalised, Shetty said.

“For this airdrop programme, we will use the WRX that we collected as trading fees. We will not specially unlock or use any reserved WRX for this airdrop programme,” he said. “Sellers/Traders who bought and sold SHIB at exceptionally high prices, i.e., above ₹0.0020 won’t be eligible.”

Shetty also said that it is continuing to work with its banking partners to bring back the account opening facilities which have been temporarily disabled. He called the issue “industry wide”.

Over the last few weeks, several banks have enforced restrictions around allowing transactions to buy or sell cryptocurrency.