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Binance screws up on Helium blockchain tokens and loses $20 million

Gaétan Lajeune 1 min read
binance helium

On Friday, Binance, the exchange we don’t need to introduce anymore, made a mistake with the Helium project. The Yellow and Black Dragon has indeed given away 4.8 million Helium Tokens (HNT) to users, which is the equivalent of $20 million!

Binance discovers too late that the Helium project has 2 tokens

We recently told you about the Helium blockchain, which is currently undergoing a community vote on whether or not it should migrate to Solana. Today we are not going to bring you the answer, but we are going to tell you about a mistake Binance made with this project.

We didn’t tell you last time, but the Helium project is composed of 2 tokens:

  • The HNT: the reward token you get with the hotspot devices
  • The MOBILE: the reward token of the 5G infrastructure

The HNT, as the historical token of the project is available on many exchanges including Binance. The MOBILE token, on the other hand, is only available since August 12 and has a low liquidity. But then what happened?

As we said, the HNT is listed on Binance, but its little brother the MOBILE is not. Binance obviously didn’t know that they were two different tokens and thought that it must be a name change or a fork.

Basically, for Binance 1 HNT = 1 MOBILE.

So users who had fun sending MOBILE to their HNT address on Binance were credited the same amount in HNT.

The problem is that the two tokens are not worth the same price due to the lack of liquidity of MOBILE!

This is how Binance mistakenly distributed 4.8 million HNTs that some smart guys who were happy with this money fell from the sky immediately resold! Be honest, you would have done the same.

The balance sheet will cost Binance 20 million dollars. As for the Helium token, victim of a massive and sudden sale, it will plunge a few percent, but nothing too serious.

If this mistake is not dramatic for Binance, the Helium project is currently victim of a wave of panic and FUD. The reason? Some people still haven’t understood that the mistake came from Binance and not from Helium. In a bear market, people tend to panic quickly, so we wish Helium a good recovery before their probable migration to Solana. Because yes, with 3 days to go and 90% in favor… Helium should end up on Solana.