Onchain derivatives platform Paradex has refunded $650,000 to roughly 200 users after a routine database upgrade went wrong, corrupting market data and causing unintended liquidations across several trading pairs.
A routine upgrade turns into a trading disruption
The incident unfolded during a scheduled 30-minute database upgrade earlier this week. Paradex later said a race condition caused faulty funding data to be written onchain, distorting prices and margin calculations across multiple markets.
In a post-mortem shared on X, the exchange stressed that the failure was operational, not the result of a hack or security breach. Still, the corrupted data set off a chain reaction of liquidations before the team intervened.
Chain rollback and refunds to affected users
Paradex temporarily shut down the platform, canceled all open orders except take-profit and stop-loss instructions, and rolled the chain back to a snapshot taken before maintenance began.
The rollback marked the first in the history of Paradex Chain. The exchange called it an “undesired but necessary” step to restore network integrity and protect users, before issuing refunds totaling $650,000 to those affected.
A growing pattern of technical failures in trading
Paradex’s incident joins a string of disruptions caused by software and infrastructure problems rather than cyberattacks. In October, dYdX paused trading for hours after an ordering bug and oracle delays led to mispriced positions and liquidations.
Traditional markets have faced similar risks. In November, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange halted trading for nearly 10 hours after a cooling failure at a data center, while Cloudflare outages briefly blocked access to major crypto platforms, including Coinbase and Ledger.