Crypto exchange Bitget says it is sending letters from its lawyers to account holders it alleges were involved in manipulating the price of perpetual futures contracts tied to the VOXEL token.

Eight account holders that the exchange accuses of being involved in the April 20 incident and who allegedly pocketed $20 million between them will receive a letter from the exchange’s lawyers in “quick succession,” Xie Jiayin, Bitget’s head of Chinese operations, said in an April 27 X post.

“These eight accounts are the main instigators of the VOXEL incident and have improperly gained more than 20 million US dollars from it,” she said, according to a translation of the post.

“Except for these eight accounts, all other users who participated in VOXEL trading on April 20 and have withdrawn funds do not need to worry,” she added. “The accounts have been restored to normal and no responsibility will be pursued in the future.”

Source: Xie Jiayin

On April 20, Bitget said it discovered “abnormal trading activity” on its VOXEL/USDT perpetual futures contract and paused accounts it suspected of market manipulation.

The trading pair clocked over $12 billion in volume, dwarfing the metrics of the same contract on Binance. After the pause, Bitget rolled back the irregular trades to claw back the gains.

At the time, Bitget CEO Gracy Chen told Cointelegraph that the trades were between individual market participants, not the platform itself, and insisted the losses were not platform-wide and user funds remained safe.

Bitget still investigating cause of incident 

Jiayin said Bitget plans to distribute 100% of the recovered funds to affected users through airdrops while a complete incident report is still in the works.

Some X users claimed the incident was caused by a bug in a market maker bot, which caused VOXEL’s excessive volume. Traders who spotted the suspected bug early used high-leverage bets to boost their profits in a zero-cost exploit.

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VOXEL is the native utility token of Voxies, a free-to-play, 3D turn-based tactical RPG game built on the Ethereum blockchain.

Decentralized exchange Hyperliquid suffered a similar incident on March 27, when a whale allegedly exploited the liquidation parameters to profit at least $6.26 million on the Jelly my Jelly (JELLY) memecoin.

Hyperliquid has since delisted perpetual futures tied to the JELLY token, citing evidence of suspicious market activity as the reason for the decision. 

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Bitcoin is starting to act as a store of value during times of “US-risk-off” sentiment, marking a potential shift in its relationship with traditional assets, according to the New York Digital Investment Group.

Bitcoin (BTC) felt “noticeably different” over the trading week ended April 25, NYDIG’s global head of research Greg Cipolaro said in an April 25 market note. 

“We’ve been observing subtle shifts in its behavior over the past few weeks,” he added. “The decoupling from traditional risk assets is still very early and fragile, but for those watching crypto markets 24/7, the shift is palpable.”

“Bitcoin has acted less like a liquid levered version of levered US equity beta and more like the non-sovereign issued store of value that it is.”

Cipolaro noted that Bitcoin has gained more than 13% since the beginning of April, while US markets such as the S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq have declined amid escalating global trade tensions due to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

He added that the US dollar and long-term US Treasurys have also underperformed since the election and Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, which lumped every country with various rates, the minimum being 10%.

Gold and currencies such as the Swiss franc have been consistent winners as safe havens, Cipolaro said, noting that Bitcoin is emerging as a non-sovereign store of value.

Amid surging volatility in equities, measured with the VIX index, foreign exchange rates (CVIX index), and interest rates and bonds (MOVE index), investors have been on the hunt for these safe haven assets. 

Several asset classes have recently seen high volatility. Source: NYDIG

Cipolaro said investors are also seeking alternatives to US hegemony, whether that is stocks, bonds, forex, or commodities. 

Few large liquid options

However, Cipolaro said investors seeking alternatives outside traditional financial systems have few large, liquid options.

Gold remains the largest non-sovereign store of value at around a $22 trillion market cap, while Bitcoin has just a fraction of that at $1.8 trillion. 

Related: New Bitcoin price all-time highs could occur in May — Here is why

Additionally, Bitcoin is the only top crypto asset listed that “solely focuses on monetary or store of value use cases,” while the others are better described as the fuel for decentralized application platforms, he said. 

Cipolaro concluded that despite Bitcoin’s recent gains, “there are few signs of the market overheating,” and the recovery is still in early stages.

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The Ethereum mainnet’s gas limit could theoretically grow 100-fold and reach 2,000 transactions per second under a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) put forward by Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist.

Feist, who had the blockchain’s “danksharding” data storage solution named after him, put forward EIP-9698 on April 27, which would introduce a “deterministic gas limit growth schedule” starting at epoch 369017, or around June 1.

The proposal would gradually increase the gas limit by a factor of 10 for roughly two years, or 164,250 epochs, when one final tenfold increase would occur.

Ethereum clients would need to vote on the proposal for it to take effect, Feist said.

“By introducing a predictable exponential growth pattern as a client default, this EIP encourages a sustainable and transparent gas limit trajectory, aligned with expected advancements in hardware and protocol efficiency,” he added.

As Ethereum can occasionally reach up to 20 TPS in blocks dominated by simple transactions, a 100x gas limit increase could theoretically increase Ethereum’s TPS to 2,000. Feist’s proposal would better position Ethereum to compete with the likes of Solana, which currently processes a non-vote TPS between 800 to 1,050 and has a theoretical TPS of 65,000.

Source: Fabda.eth

The EIP would expand the current gas limit of 36 million to 3.6 billion, potentially allowing around 6,000 transactions to fit into Ethereum blocks.

Feist’s proposal comes after Ethereum validators agreed to raise the gas limit from 30 million to 36 million in February.

Before that, the last change to Ethereum’s gas limit occurred in August 2021 under the London hard fork, where the figure was roughly doubled from 15 million to 30 million.

Daily change in Ethereum Average Gas Limit over the last five years. Source: YCharts

Feist acknowledged that a rapid increase in the gas limit under his proposal may stress less-optimized nodes and increase block propagation times. 

“However, the exponential schedule with very gradual increments per epoch gives node operators and developers ample time to adapt and optimize,” he said.

Related: Ethereum community members propose new fee structure for the app layer

EIP-9698 marks the Ethereum community’s latest effort to boost scalability at the base layer after predominantly focusing on scaling through layer 2 solutions in recent years.

Critics of Ethereum’s layer-2 focused strategy claim that it has fragmented the ecosystem into several siloed chains with little interoperability, leading to a worse user experience.

EIP-9678 looks to increase gas limit

Ethereum developers are also looking to test a fourfold increase of Ethereum’s gas limit in the Fusaka hard fork under EIP-9678.

Fusaka has been flagged as possibly going online in late 2025, while the next major Ethereum upgrade, Pectra, is scheduled to go live on the mainnet in May.

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