On the evening of Saturday, July 13, the steeblecoin issuer Tether unexpectedly released 5 billion USDT tokens on the TRON blockchain. Almost immediately released tokens were burned, and instead of them 50 million tokens were issued, which were intended for the Poloniex Bitcoin Exchange.

Paolo Ardoino, CTO affiliated with Tether Bitfinex, commented on the situation as follows:

“In preparation for the transfer of emissions from Omni to Tron, a problem arose with the token digits in numeric digits. Please check token burning transactions. ”

While preparing the issue for the Omni to Tron swap there. Please check the burn transactions below @ Tether_to https://t.co/reEW51qCqi https://t.co/zo5i3ayTuQ https://t.co/h1Y9Mnr4Oq

– Paolo Ardoino (@paoloardoino) July 13, 2019

The answer under the Ardino record was also left by representatives of the Poloniex exchange.

“Paolo is right – this happened at the moment when Poloniex used Tether to transfer the USDT from one blockchain to another. An incorrect amount of USDT was accidentally released, but then everything was adjusted to the required amount. ”

Paolo is correct – this occurred while Poloniex was conducting a USDT chain swap with the help of Tether. This has been resolved to the intended value.

– Poloniex Exchange (@Poloniex) July 14, 2019

It should be noted that the total number of USDT tokens in circulation on the Omni blockchain currently stands at 3.91 billion.

Despite the quickly corrected error, what happened had time to have a definite impact on the price of Bitcoin. The rate of the first cryptocurrency declined on Saturday afternoon, at some point dropping below $ 11,000 on a number of exchanges, but immediately went up after it became aware of the Tron-USDT record issue.

At some stage, the price of Bitcoin again rose close to $ 11,500, but subsequently corrected. At the time of publication, BTC is trading at $ 11,180.

Follow BlockchainJournal on Twitter !