[peloton]

There wasn't market manipulation here on GDAX's part. The people they are compensating are those who got wiped because they were trading on margin (if anyone is not familiar, this adds much more risk). These people already had their portfolios auto-liquidated via the margin call so stopping trading afterwards had no impact. Same with stop loss orders, although there's a different mechanism at play there.

From GDAX's point of view the tradeoff boiled down to whether to invest in PR / brand today or risk a moral hazard problem in the future (users expecting bailouts so they take more risk).