Dormant Cardano Whale Reemerges, Loses $6M in Single Swap - Crypto Economy
TL;DR A wallet inactive for 5 years attempted to swap 14.4 million ADA in a single transaction. The swap generated $6.05 million in losses due to slippage because of the low liquidity of the USDA...
TL;DR
- A wallet inactive for 5 years attempted to swap 14.4 million ADA in a single transaction.
- The swap generated $6.05 million in losses due to slippage because of the low liquidity of the USDA pool.
- Researcher ZachXBT called the operation “the unluckiest trade of the month.”
Wakes up after 5 years and loses $6 million in a single swap due to slippage. A catastrophic trading execution error shook the Cardano community this Monday. A “whale,” which had remained completely inactive for five years, unexpectedly reappeared only to lose more than $6 million in an instant.
ZachXBT, an on-chain researcher, detected the movement immediately. They attempted to convert 14.4 million ADA tokens into 87,000 USDA, the network’s native stablecoin. What should have been a simple capital rotation turned into a financial disaster due to a fatal error: the wallet executed the entire order in a single block.
The order was not split, nor did they check the pool’s liquidity depth. The markets for the USDA stablecoin are still “thin” and are not prepared to absorb orders of that size.
The slippage disaster: Millions lost due to low liquidity
The order issued triggered the price ratio within the liquidity pool. This caused the price of ADA to collapse and the USDA price to spike momentarily within the trade itself, a phenomenon known as slippage or price slippage.
When the swap finally completed, the wallet had suffered an effective loss of $6.05 million due to this slippage. ZachXBT aptly called it “the unluckiest trade of the month.” This incident is a clear example of how a Cardano whale loses millions not from a hack or a scam, but from poor execution in the complex DeFi environment.
The error was aggravated by the fragile market conditions for Cardano. The ADA token is trading near multi-month lows ($0.48), with technical indicators like the RSI (32) and the MACD showing strong selling momentum and buyer exhaustion.
Furthermore, the total circulating supply of USDA is only about 10 million tokens. The whale’s order was so large in proportion to the available liquidity that it made the million-dollar loss inevitable, a reminder that, in DeFi, a trader’s biggest enemy can be themselves.
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