Gate's BENUSDT perpetual market recorded 92 liquidation orders in the 65 seconds following a scheduled stock-dividend adjustment on Sept. 30, according to the exchange's public liquidation feed.

Two accounts identifying themselves as Gate managers acknowledged the incident on X. In a reply on the platform, @luxiong_Gate said a same-name asset error affected roughly 200 accounts, that the problem was located and handled within minutes, and that affected balance displays were being restored. The account said users would suffer no losses. @Godot_gate posted the same explanation.

The episode traces back to a mismatch between an announced corporate action and the contract's actual price feed. Gate's Sept. 28 announcement assigned a $0.33 Franklin Resources dividend adjustment to BENUSDT, payable at 4 a.m. ET on Sept. 30. Yet the contract's mark price—the reference price used for settlement—stood at just 0.000589 USDT in the minute before the adjustment, according to Gate's historical data. The announced adjustment was roughly 560 times the mark price. Under Gate's rules, net long positions receive the payment and net shorts pay it.

A Stock Adjustment on a Crypto Index

Gate's announcement identified BENUSDT's underlying asset as Franklin Resources, the asset manager that trades under the ticker BEN on the New York Stock Exchange. But the exchange's public index-composition endpoint showed the contract drawing prices from BEN trading pairs on MEXC and Uniswap V3—not from an equities data feed. The name collision between the Franklin Resources ticker and a crypto token of the same symbol appears to be at the root of the error the manager accounts described.

The contract specification listed a multiplier of 100. Applying the announcement's formula—net contract quantity multiplied by the contract multiplier and the per-share dividend—would produce a 33 USDT adjustment for each net contract. That figure is the formula's implied payment, not a verified amount ultimately retained by traders.

The mechanism explains why the adjustment threatened short positions even without any comparable move in market price. Gate said the dividend would be processed as an additional funding payment, separate from ordinary funding, and warned that deductions could leave short positions with insufficient margin and trigger liquidation. Gate's dividend rules describe these payments as contract-level adjustments intended to reflect an underlying asset going ex-dividend; they do not confer ownership of shares or direct dividend rights.

Unresolved Questions

The liquidation feed establishes that orders were recorded immediately after the scheduled settlement, but it does not identify individual account balances or establish final customer losses. The amount ultimately credited, withdrawn or reversed remains unclear.

The two manager accounts described the recovery as a restoration of balance displays. Neither set out a clawback policy or a compensation timetable. Both directed users with outstanding problems to customer service.

Gate has not publicly detailed how it will distinguish between liquidations caused by the erroneous adjustment and those attributable to ordinary market movements, or whether margin calls triggered during the 65-second window will be reversed.

Funding Rates Are Not the Whole Cash-Flow Picture

The incident highlights a structural feature of Gate's stock and ETF perpetuals: monitoring the ordinary funding rate alone does not capture all cash-flow exposure. Gate's regular funding formula has upper and lower limits, while its dividend mechanism uses a separate per-unit adjustment and does not change the regular rate. A trader hedging on the basis of funding alone could face an unanticipated cash flow when a corporate action lands.

The distinction also places corporate-action implementation squarely inside the exchange's rulebook. Issuer disclosures inform Gate's decision but do not themselves determine the contract payment. Gate reserves the right to change or cancel settlement when distributions change or data anomalies arise. For these derivatives, corporate-action announcements function as part of the cash-flow specification, not merely background issuer news.

For now, affected traders await specifics. The manager accounts committed to restoring balance displays but published no timeline for compensation, leaving the roughly 200 affected accounts to verify their balances independently against Gate's public liquidation and settlement records.