Gate's BEN Futures Error Leaves One Account $1.46 Million in the Red

A $0.33 Dividend Hit the Wrong Contract

A settlement failure at crypto exchange Gate pushed a $0.33-per-share dividend tied to Franklin Resources, the US asset manager behind Franklin Templeton, onto the wrong trading contract on Wednesday. The misfire wiped out leveraged traders who were betting against the position, even though the affected contract's price barely moved. Under a notice the platform published on Monday, Franklin Resources' $0.33 per-share dividend was scheduled to pass through a contract called BEN at 08:00 UTC on Wednesday. BEN is a perpetual futures contract, a leveraged bet on an asset's price with no expiry date. Gate's rules route dividend payments to longs, the traders betting on a rise, and collect them from shorts. The problem was what BEN actually referenced. Screenshots shared by traders showed the contract changing hands near $0.000585, the level of a low-value crypto token that shares its ticker with the Franklin Resources stock, rather than at any share price. Against that level, a $0.33 charge is roughly 564 times the contract's price. The settlement ran through the venue's automated contract system, code that executes without human sign-off in the manner of an on-chain smart contract, and the dividend debit alone drained the cash margin leveraged accounts post to cover losses. Once that buffer emptied, the platform force-closed the positions in a slippage-free sequence of forced closures, since the price print itself had moved almost nothing. Gate's own notice had warned shorts that the payment could trigger liquidation if balances ran low. Some accounts shared one margin pool across several bets, so unrelated positions closed as well. One screenshot posted on X by user SmallPig0526 showed an account at a negative $1.46 million balance. Longs saw the reverse, with outsized credits landing in their accounts, though it is unconfirmed whether any of that money was withdrawn. Gate counts about 200 accounts among those affected.

@SmallPig0526 · X post

SmallPig0526.

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Gate Promises to Cover the Losses

Godot, who leads Gate's creator community program, said the platform identified and patched the fault within minutes, that balance restoration is underway, and that the exchange is absorbing the entire loss. In a post on X he wrote: “Today at 16:00 UTC+8, while processing the BEN contract funding rate in accordance with the announcement made two days ago, we encountered an error due to duplicate names, affecting a total of 200 accounts...The resulting user balance display issues are being resolved progressively. All users have incurred no losses whatsoever, with Gate bearing the full responsibility.” No detailed incident report has been published so far, and the timing is awkward for a venue pushing deeper into stock products. Gate added Japanese stock trading in August, and rivals are moving the same way, with the NYSE recently signing a deal to bring tokenized US stocks to crypto users, a contest that now runs across the field of best crypto exchanges. Gate has not yet said how it will treat the credits already paid to long positions, an open question that keeps the FUD around the affected balances alive on X, where screenshots of the negative account continue to circulate.

@Godot_gate · X post

Wrote.

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Duplicate Tickers Become a Structural Risk

For COINOTAG, the load-bearing document here is Godot's own post: it confirms the trigger was a duplicate-name collision between a legacy equity ticker and a crypto token, not a market move and not a hack. Traditional equity settlement assumes tickers are unique; crypto markets have never guaranteed that. As more venues pipe real dividends through perpetual contracts, every shared symbol becomes a standing failure point. The two items to watch next are Gate's promised incident report and whether it claws back the long-side credits.