Gate misroutes Franklin Resources dividend through wrong token, wipes $1.46 million account

• Gate routed a $0.33 per-share Franklin Resources dividend through BENUSDT, a contract trading near $0.000585, a roughly 564-fold mismatch.
• About 200 accounts were affected, including one that swung to a negative $1.46 million balance, according to a screenshot shared on X.
• Gate says it fixed the error within minutes and will restore all balances, absorbing the loss itself rather than passing it to traders.

• $1.46M negative balance on one account after the mismatch
• 200 accounts affected by Gate’s dividend routing error
• 564x size of the dividend charge versus the contract’s price

Gate, a centralized crypto exchange expanding into tokenized stock trading, mistakenly routed a Franklin Resources dividend through BENUSDT, a perpetual futures contract that lets traders bet on an asset’s price with no expiration date, on Wednesday (September 9), according to a report from BeInCrypto. The mix-up erased leveraged short positions even though the contract’s price barely moved, because two unrelated assets shared the same BEN ticker. Gate said roughly 200 accounts were affected and pledged to cover the losses itself.

Gate Charges a $0.33 Dividend to a $0.000585 Token

On Monday (September 7), Gate posted an announcement saying Franklin Resources, the asset manager behind Franklin Templeton, would pay a $0.33 per-share dividend through BENUSDT at 08:00 UTC two days later. Under Gate’s rules, traders betting the price would rise, called longs, receive the payment, while traders betting on a decline, called shorts, pay it. Screenshots shared by traders showed BENUSDT was actually trading near $0.000585, the price of an unrelated low-value crypto token carrying the same $BEN ticker.

A $0.33 charge against a $0.000585 contract equals roughly 564 times the position’s value. For shorts, it functioned less like a dividend payment and more like an instant liquidation trigger.

$1.46 Million Account Shows a Liquidation With No Price Move

Leveraged traders post a cash deposit called margin to cover potential losses; when that deposit runs out, the exchange force-closes the position, a process known as liquidation. The dividend charge alone drained many shorts’ margin balances, and because some accounts pooled margin across several open bets, unrelated positions closed too.

One screenshot posted on X by the user @SmallPig0526 showed an account swinging to a negative $1.46 million balance.

Longs saw the reverse effect, with outsized credits appearing in their balances. Gate has not said whether any of those funds were withdrawn before the reversal.

Godot, who leads Gate’s creator community program, said the platform identified and fixed the error within minutes and would restore all affected balances.

Today at 16:00 UTC+8, while processing the BEN contract funding rate in accordance with the announcement made two days ago, we encountered an error due to duplicate names, affecting a total of 200 accounts…The resulting user balance display issues are being resolved progressively. All users have incurred no losses whatsoever, with Gate bearing the full responsibility.

Godot, head of Gate’s creator community program

Gate’s Push Into Stock Products Continues Without a Formal Postmortem

Gate has not published a detailed incident report explaining how the ticker collision passed internal checks before the funding payment executed.

The error lands as Gate expands into tokenized equities, having added Japanese stock trading in August, and as rivals chase the same market. The New York Stock Exchange has separately signed a deal to bring tokenized US stocks to crypto users, adding pressure on exchanges to get ticker and settlement logic right.

The CCS read. We see this less as a dividend mix-up and more as a namespace problem: exchanges listing tokenized securities alongside unrelated tokens sharing tickers are stacking settlement risk on top of market risk. Institutions vetting these venues should treat ticker collisions as a due diligence line item, not a footnote, before trusting a community manager’s post over an audited incident report.

Gate has not said whether it will claw back the outsized credits paid to longs during the error window, leaving open how the exchange balances its books once a formal postmortem, if one comes, is published.</p