XPL bug hits Aster, Hypervault rug pull suspected

Aster and Hyperliquid have spent the past week locked in a duel for perpetual decentralized exchange (perp DEX) dominance. The question: Can the former lure traders faster than the latter loses them?

Last night brought Aster’s first major stumble while a suspected rug pull deepened the exodus of capital from Hyperliquid’s L1.

Aster’s disaster

Yesterday’s launch of Plasma’s mainnet and XPL token kicked off an on-chain frenzy. The new chain accrued $2.5 billion of total value locked (TVL) on day one, according to DeFiLlama data.

Users hoping to trade the volatility of a freshly launched and hotly anticipated token on Aster got slightly more than they bargained for, however.

Read more: Aster vs Hyperliquid: inside the high-stakes perp DEX war

Screenshots show the price of XPL wicking to $4, while previously trading in the range of $1. A follow-up post from Aster stated that affected users “will have their liquidation losses calculated and reimbursed directly to their wallets in USDT.”

Compensation was confirmed around two and a half hours later.

One observer questioned on X, “Why we are calling this a DEX?” After attempting to verify what led to the incident, they claim to only be able to access “an API that returns the last 1000 trades.”

They also note that “on Hyperliquid… [you] can reconstruct the full history of trades and even the addresses,” adding that Aster is more like a “CEX without KYC where you login with your wallet.”

Read more: Is Aster just CZ taking Binance on-chain?

Hypervault pulls the rug?

As well as being the top perps DEX in DeFi (at least until recently), Hyperliquid runs its own chain. It hosts dozens of projects, 10 of which have a TVL of over $100 million. 

This morning, blockchain security firm Peckshield flagged suspicious withdrawals from one of the smaller projects, a yield farm called Hypervault.