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Exchange arbitrarily changing the face value of DOT, Polkadot founder harshly criticizes: Unscrupulous and irresponsible exchange!

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Exchange arbitrarily changing the face value of DOT, Polkadot founder harshly criticizes: Unscrupulous and irresponsible exchange!

Yesterday, Gavin Wood, the founder of the cross-chain protocol Polkadot and also a co-founder of Ethereum, expressed his dissatisfaction on Twitter towards certain "unscrupulous exchanges" that arbitrarily changed the face value of tokens. He stated that these exchanges' selfish and irresponsible actions have seriously affected stakeholders of Polkadot.

Unauthorized Token Denomination Changes

The incident can be traced back to a previous "DOT Token Split Proposal" approved by Polkadot. The proposal planned to split the original 1 DOT into 100 new DOT tokens at a ratio of 1:100, increasing the total supply of DOT from 10 million to 1 billion. The main benefit of this proposal was to simplify the measurement system of DOT by avoiding excessive decimal points, and the change in denomination would not have an economic impact on the Polkadot ecosystem.

Source: Polkadot

Ultimately, the split proposal received 86% support and was scheduled to be activated 72 hours after the transfer function launch, which was at some point on August 21st. However, according to Gavin Wood, exchanges such as Kraken and Binance took matters into their own hands in the first three days of the DOT split, allowing trading on their platforms with the post-split denomination, leading investors to mistakenly believe that the DOT price had dropped by 90% when viewing price data on these platforms.

The Web3 Foundation behind Polkadot pointed out that this action clearly caused significant anxiety to some DOT holders, who mistakenly believed that the value of DOT had dropped by 90%, resulting in holders or traders making incorrect judgments.

Furthermore, Polkadot sent an email to the community stating that the actions of these centralized exchanges were both selfish and irresponsible, putting Polkadot stakeholders at risk. However, as Polkadot is a decentralized, permissionless system, it is powerless against third parties who adamantly carry out harmful actions to the ecosystem.

Kraken: Decision Based on Customer Interests

In response to this incident, Kraken officials stated in an interview that their actions were based on maximizing customer interests.

"As always, our primary focus is on customers. We make decisions that align with maximizing customer interests and have received positive feedback from them. We have seen an increase in interest, with customers depositing 192,500 DOT on the platform (currently valued at approximately $53 million)."

While the decisions of Binance and Kraken may not have been malicious, such a significant price disparity did impact some DOT holders and traders.

More importantly, this incident highlights the increasingly tense relationship between community-centric projects like Polkadot and profit-driven centralized exchanges.