A few days ago, as you might remember, ETH price crashed on GDAX, going from over 300$ to 0.10$.
After so many complaints by people who lost money, I wrote an article about it, where I questioned if us, USERS, were prepared to deal with free market and all what's implied with it.
Today, GDAX released a note (https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-2-216a3b946ef6) on their blog where they state the following:
- For customers who had buy orders filled — we are honoring all executed orders and no trades will be reversed.
- For affected customers who had margin calls or stop loss orders executed — we are crediting you using company funds.
So apparently, out of good will and empathy towards their customers, they are willing not only to maintain winnings on those who bought cheap ETH (as cheap as 0.10$), but they will also restore lost funds by clients, WITH THEIR OWN COMPANY FUNDS.
Maybe I am a terrible human being, but something does not smell good in here.
Think about this. GDAX is a company dedicated to provide a certain service, which they claim to have provided successfully (see their first blog post after the crash here: https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1).
Tell me just one successful company in the world who does something right and compensates whoever complains about it.
WHY ON EARTH WOULD A TRADING COMPANY, WHO STATES THERE WAS "NO WRONGDOING", GIVE MONEY FOR FREE?
To me, there are only two possible options:
They lost so much credibility and potential profit out of unsatisfied customers, that they are willing (in the need) to spend money to cover all stop losses and margin calls.
If this is the case, either not so much money was lost by customers, or they are really suffering to pay back all withdrawal orders they might be getting (maybe they don't hold funds to pay back if all customers decide to withdraw at the same time?)They are somehow implicated in this movement, and they can afford to pay this money back.
If this is the case, they might want to deviate attention by doing what's politically correct, to focus public attention on how they responded correctly, rather than what they might have done wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I am really happy for those who will be refunded, and hope they learn their lesson, but don't let that drive the attention where GDAX wants to.
Simply imagine someone had a symbolic order of 500$ at 0.1$. This person would have bought 5000 ETH. Right now the price of each token is around 320$. That's around 1,600,000$.
GDAX is saying that in this case they would accept the 1,599,500$ winnings by the buyer and give back 1,600,000$ to all those who sold to this lucky person at an unfair price.
Something's not right here, and I won't simply clap my hands to this company and move on as if nothing ever happened.