What Went Wrong That Led to the Binance Helium $22 Million Accounting Mishap

cryptonews.com:

Four Binance.us customers have unexpectedly received a total of almost $22 million in cryptocurrency, after the crypto-exchange erroneously credited holders of Helium's new MOBILE token with the more valuable helium (HNT) token instead. It appears that most of the mistakenly credited HNT has been sold on by their lucky receivers, with the accidental payout coinciding with a selloff that saw HNT's price dive from over $7 to an 18-month low of around $3.33.

While Binance has patched the bug that led to the accounting mistake, its error has left it $22 million out of pocket at today's HNT price, or $263.4 million when using HNT's all-time high of $54.88 (set back in November 2021). 

However, it gets worse, because on-chain analysis appears to indicate that Binance.us had to take HNT legitimately held by its other users to 'honor' the HNT it mistakenly attributed to the four lucky recipients. 

What's most striking about Binance's mistake is that it went on for a fairly long period of time, spanning from August 23 from September 15. In other words, it lasted for 23 days before someone at Binance.us noticed what was going on and the exchange put a stop to it. 

For whatever reason, Binance's systems contained a bug that caused it to classify Helium's new MOBILE token as HNT, which is vastly more valuable. Indeed, one MOBILE token is worth less than one thousandth of a HNT token.

Accordingly, when four wallets deposited some 4,829,043 MOBILE onto Binance.us, the exchange credited these wallets with the same amount in HNT.

It was at this point that these users -- who podcast host Arman Dezfuli-Arjomandi describes as "attackers" in the above thread -- began steadily selling their newly acquired HNT tokens. Given the large supply they