Gate has forcibly settled perpetual futures positions across 21 cryptocurrencies, accelerating a broad delisting process that will also remove the affected tokens from spot, margin and other trading services next week.
The exchange moved the affected perpetual markets into Reduce Only mode at 07:30 UTC on Sept. 10, preventing traders from opening or increasing positions while still allowing them to close existing exposure.
Thirty minutes later, at 08:00 UTC, Gate stopped futures trading and automatically settled any positions that remained open. The settlement price was calculated using the average index price during the final 30 minutes before trading ended, while all outstanding unfilled orders were automatically cancelled.
The 21 affected tokens are CDL, PNDO, REDO, KNINE, BEER, MANEKI, KLINK, VOLT, ROUTE, FPS, DOGNFT, OSHI, LON, KIP, THL, OPN1, RFD, ALD, ZERO, ICX and BAL.
Gate announced the removals on Sept. 9 after what it described as a reevaluation of the assets. The exchange said the tokens no longer met its standards for active trading, without providing individual reasons for each project.
The futures closure is only the first major trading deadline.
Gate has already suspended deposits for the affected assets and stopped new margin borrowing and crypto-loan activity involving them. On Sept. 16 at 03:00 UTC, the exchange plans to remove the associated spot pairs and terminate grid trading, Simple Earn and margin trading support.
Users with the tokens in Simple Earn can redeem them beforehand, while Gate will automatically redeem remaining holdings before the Sept. 16 deadline. Outstanding margin loans involving the affected assets will similarly need to be repaid or face automatic settlement.
The scope of the action is notable because it combines obscure, thinly traded assets with several tokens that have had considerably longer histories in the crypto market.
ICX is the native token associated with the ICON ecosystem, while BAL is the governance token of decentralized-finance protocol Balancer. ROUTE is associated with Router Protocol, which recently announced that it would wind down operations by the end of September after failing to establish a sustainable commercial model.
Other names in the batch have substantially smaller markets and thinner liquidity.
Some were already experiencing sharp price moves around the delisting announcement. Gate’s own news page showed PNDO down more than 63% and REDO down around 13% when summarizing the decision on Sept. 9.
ICX was also under pressure around the futures deadline. Kraken data showed its perpetual contract around $0.012 early on Sept. 10, down roughly 17.6% over 24 hours, with only about $22,000 in 24-hour futures volume on that venue.
Those figures do not demonstrate that Gate’s settlement prices diverged from the wider market, but they illustrate why the final pricing window matters when an exchange closes leveraged markets in less-liquid tokens.
Gate does not use the final traded futures price alone to settle a delisted perpetual. Instead, its methodology relies on the average underlying index price over the preceding half-hour.
In previous perpetual-delisting notices, the exchange has also said that when significant volatility occurs during the final 30 minutes, it may use an average drawn from a longer period to reduce the potential effect of market manipulation.
The remaining token holders now face a second phase of the process.
Gate said customers who do not want to participate in its post-delisting buyback should withdraw their assets or move them to the Gate Web3 Wallet. Users who continue holding affected assets on the centralized platform after Sept. 29 can apply for a buyback between Sept. 29 at 16:00 UTC and Oct. 6 at 16:00 UTC.
The exchange has published fixed buyback prices for all 21 assets, including 0.0007458 USDT for CDL, 0.00006328 USDT for PNDO, 0.003616 USDT for ZERO, 0.002146 USDT for ICX and 0.02162 USDT for BAL.
However, the buyback is capped at just 100 USDT per user.
Gate also warned that after delisting it may not be able to provide technical support for problems involving abnormal token transfers, changes to token supply or token swaps and contract migrations.
Why the Final 30 Minutes Matter for Thin Crypto Perpetuals
A delisting sounds straightforward until leverage is involved.
Closing a spot market means traders can normally sell beforehand or withdraw their tokens elsewhere. Closing a perpetual contract is different because every open long must ultimately be matched with a financial settlement, even if the trader does nothing.
That makes the price used for the final settlement unusually important.
Gate’s 30-minute average index methodology is designed to avoid settling thousands of positions against one potentially erratic last trade. That is particularly sensible for smaller cryptocurrencies, where a shallow order book can move substantially after relatively little buying or selling.
But averaging does not eliminate every risk.
A trader’s Gate perpetual position is being settled against an index rather than necessarily the exact price available on Gate’s futures order book. During normal trading, arbitrageurs usually keep perpetual, spot and index prices relatively close together. In the final minutes before a contract disappears, that mechanism becomes less attractive because traders know the derivatives market is about to cease existing.
Reduce Only mode adds another wrinkle.
Once it begins, nobody can establish fresh positions to take advantage of a perceived pricing difference. Traders can only reduce existing exposure. That is necessary for an orderly shutdown, but it means the market is deliberately losing one side of its normal price-discovery mechanism exactly when positions are converging toward mandatory settlement.
For highly liquid assets, that should normally matter little.
For tokens where trading volume is small, exchange coverage is limited or prices are already falling rapidly following a delisting announcement, the difference between the futures price, Gate’s underlying index components and the eventual 30-minute average becomes much more interesting.
PNDO is a good example of the environment rather than proof of a settlement problem. It was already showing a dramatic decline around the announcement, while a scheduled token unlock also fell on Sept. 10. Third-party tokenomics data puts that release at approximately 30.6 million PNDO, equivalent to 3.1% of maximum supply and around 6.5% of its market capitalization at the time.
That creates several overlapping sources of price pressure: a delisting announcement, closure of leveraged markets and new token supply arriving around the same period.
The more useful thing to examine now is therefore not simply whether each token went down.
It is whether Gate’s eventual settlement values stayed reasonably aligned with contemporaneous prices on other liquid venues during the 07:30-08:00 UTC window.
A large unexplained gap in one of the thinner tokens would be noteworthy. An orderly convergence toward the broader market would instead suggest that the averaging mechanism did exactly what it was designed to do.
Either way, the Sept. 10 futures settlement is only half of this delisting event. With spot markets remaining available until Sept. 16, the affected tokens now enter a second liquidity test as Gate users decide whether to sell, withdraw or remain for the heavily capped buyback.
Shane Neagle is a financial markets analyst and digital assets journalist specializing in cryptocurrencies, memecoins, prediction markets, and blockchain-based financial systems. His work focuses on market structure, incentive design, liquidity dynamics, and how speculative behavior emerges across decentralized platforms.
He closely covers emerging crypto narratives, including memecoin ecosystems, on-chain activity, and the role of prediction markets in pricing political, economic, and technological outcomes. His analysis examines how capital flows, trader psychology, and platform design interact to create rapid market cycles across Web3 environments.
Alongside digital assets, Shane follows broader fintech and online trading developments, particularly where traditional financial infrastructure intersects with blockchain technology. His research-driven approach emphasizes understanding why markets behave the way they do, rather than short-term price movements, helping readers navigate fast-evolving crypto and speculative markets with clearer context.