Namaste Tribe! WazirX is India’s most trusted crypto exchange because of YOU. Today, we’re announcing a WRX airdrop program for WazirX users who bought SHIB at high price and could not sell it.

Incident Background

For every new listing, we always enable deposits/withdrawals and markets simultaneously. On May 13, 2021, when we listed SHIB market, its deposits and withdrawals took longer to go live due to an anomaly. There was a temporary demand-supply mismatch which caused SHIB prices to climb up briefly. As soon as our team discovered this anomaly, and turned on SHIB deposits and withdrawals, SHIB price auto-adjusted based on the new deposits coming in from our users. Unfortunately, people who bought SHIB at high price and could not sell it faced losses.

WRX airdrop program for affected users

WazirX is all about trust, and we want each one of you to know that we’ve got your back! We want to help our users who were affected by SHIB’s rapid price increase, and suffered losses. We will conduct this WRX airdrop program over the next 4 months where we will airdrop WRX tokens equivalent to 25% of your loss every month for the next 4 months.

Where will the WRX come from?

If you’re an existing WRX holder, you don’t have to worry. For this airdrop program, we will use our existing WRX reserves. We will not specially unlock or use any reserved WRX for this airdrop program.

Who is eligible for this airdrop?

1. Anyone who bought SHIB at exceptionally high price i.e., above ₹0.0020 and never sold it. These are the users wanted to hold SHIB for long-term but bought it at significantly above-market price.
2. Anyone who bought SHIB at exceptionally high price i.e., above ₹0.0020 and sold it after prices normalized, i.e., went below ₹0.0020 based on the new deposits coming in from our customers.

Important to note:

1. Sellers/Traders who bought and sold SHIB at exceptionally high prices, i.e., above ₹0.0020 won’t be eligible.
2. WazirX reserves the right in its sole discretion to include or exclude any particular user or set of users or decide the eligibility criteria like cut-off price, amount of airdrop per user, mode and schedule of disbursement, etc.

What is needed from my end?

Nothing! You don’t have to share any proof, and you will not be troubled. We’ll process everything at our end. You have started your crypto journey with us; we’ll be there for you.

Here’s what you must know

There are some misconceptions around WazirX which we want to clarify. I request you to share this with your friends, especially crypto beginners, so that they can understand things better:

1. At any point, WazirX does not decide or control the listing price or overall price of any token.
2. The prices are solely determined by buyers and sellers in the open market on WazirX. For example, for every token bought at higher price, there was a seller who made profit out of it.
3. WazirX did/does not make money by selling any token at a higher price. Since we don’t buy or sell crypto, we gain nothing from price changes.
4. We’ve always been listing tokens and allowing deposit/withdrawal at the same time.
5. Crypto is not a get-rich-quick scheme.

What measures are we taking to minimise such scenarios in the future?

As an exchange, we’re implementing processes to minimise such scenarios for future listings. For all future listings, we’ll make sure to enable deposits and withdrawals (onchain or offchain) of a token at least 1 hour prior to making its market live. This will help us ensure that anyone can bring in the liquidity for a token and will reduce our reliance on our existing small pool of liquidity providers. Going forward, we’ll make sure that:

1. There’s at least one hour gap between enabling a token’s offchain or onchain deposits/withdrawals and making its market live.
2. We make announcement about the deposits/withdrawals going live.
3. We caution investors about the risks of trading in a newly listed market.

Important to note

Regardless of our efforts, there might be unforeseeable situations where we might face a liquidity crunch – which is a common global phenomenon. As an investor, you must ensure to do your due diligence, and undertake sufficient risk assessment when trading any newly listed or existing token. 

Addressing other unrelated issues

Order cancellation issues: We’re aware that some of you have trouble with cancelling pending orders at times during heavy trading activity period in the market. We’re growing and scaling rapidly. To accommodate the rapidly growing traffic and volume, we’re working on an upgrade for the WazirX trading engine named Project Raftaar. We are on track and the first version should be ready soon.

Pending INR deposits: I want you to know that any payment you make can get stuck at 3 points in a crypto exchange:

1. Exchange itself (WazirX tries to credit within a few hours to a day)
2. Payment Processor: Anywhere from 1 day to 7 days
3. Banking Partner: Anywhere from 1 day to 14 days

If your money has been debited and not reflecting in your WazirX account, it’s because of Point 2 and 3. This is not an exchange issue or the issue of the crypto industry. In such cases, we request you to be patient as we work with our banking and payment partners to expedite your fund recovery. This is how errors happen in traditional finance and the resolution time is standard across industries. 

Unable to see account details: New bank account creation option is temporarily unavailable. Unfortunately, this is an industry-wide issue. We are working with our partners to bring back this option soon and will keep you posted.

We’re learning, scaling, and we need your support. With that, we’ll continue to build WazirX into India’s largest and most trusted exchange.

Jai Hind ??

Disclaimer: Cryptocurrency is not a legal tender and is currently unregulated. Kindly ensure that you undertake sufficient risk assessment when trading cryptocurrencies as they are often subject to high price volatility. The information provided in this section doesn't represent any investment advice or WazirX's official position. WazirX reserves the right in its sole discretion to amend or change this blog post at any time and for any reasons without prior notice.