In late August, about 900 traders in Georgia, the U.S. state, exploited the bug to gain a hundredfold profit due to the wrong exchange rate of the Georgian Lari (GEL)-denominated cryptocurrency trading pair on the Coinbase platform, sources said. The account recovers these funds.
A Coinbase spokesperson said the decimal point issue was caused by third-party technology. Reports put Coinbase’s losses at between $14 million and $140 million, although Coinbase refutes this claim.
Shortly after the traders withdrew the relevant funds from Coinbase, they were notified by the financial institution that their bank accounts and associated Visa debit cards had been frozen.
At least two domestic banks are said to have been involved in freezing the funds, although not at Coinbase’s direction, a person familiar with the matter said.