Ethereum crashed from $319 to 10c on GDAX after ‘multimillion dollar’ trade

It takes two to tango.<p>A lot of people lost a lof money because they got margin called at ~$2 for a commodity that is worth ~$300.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elnygren&#x2F;status&#x2F;877660177406865408" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elnygren&#x2F;status&#x2F;877660177406865408</a><p>On the other hand, a lot of people made a lot money since there are buy orders that wen through at less than 1% of the real price.

<i>exactly</i> the same thing happened to me with Litecoin on GDAX.<p>They sold off my entire holdings for $0.01 - $0 after fees. At the time LTC was trading for something like $25&#x2F;LTC.<p>It took about 3 weeks to get anything but an automated response from their support team.<p>This was the response:<p>&quot;After further review, this sell was due to a margin call of your margin position on the LTC&#x2F;BTC order book. A series of large sell orders were placed on the LTC&#x2F;BTC order book on May 21, 2017 around 1am UTC causing a large price decline which triggered a margin call of your position when your maintenance margin ratio was exceeded.<p>The trading engine and margin call functioned as designed. The large price decline was due to the relatively low liquidity on the order book at that time.&quot;<p>They eventually refunded the coins.... but a couple of days later removed half of the refund with no explanation. I&#x27;m out of pocket by about $1200. I&#x27;m still waiting for a response from them on that one.

I wish they would all crash and stay crashed so GPU prices will come down again ;-)

Remember this incident the next time someone on HN kvetches about how much money HFTs make &quot;just&quot; for providing liquidity.

Margin trading is inherently risky and even more so in the cryptocurrency market.<p>Remember the whale that hunted shorts <i>and</i> longs hours before the ETF rejection? If you do margin trading, you will get rekt sooner or later in this space.<p>There&#x27;s the interesting technical side to cryptocurrencies but most people underestimate the entertainment factor.

How to turn 2.0003 million dollars into 3:<p>1- Have 1 million dollars in ETH<p>2- Place a buy order at a very low price<p>3- Place a sell order for the 1 million dollars in ETH you own<p>4- Have a partner fill that sell order<p>5- Watch the price topple down and your order from 2 get filled

The buy price did. Sell price stayed mostly unaffected.

Don&#x27;t place market orders, you will get screwed sooner or later.

Meh. Flash crashes happen with big namebrand stocks too. The nice thing about flash crashes due to dumping is that they are self-punishing: whoever was dumb enough to dump that much ETH in a few seconds cost themselves a <i>ton</i> of money. A fool and his money are soon parted.

Someone needs to teach them the concept of accumulation &amp; distribution phases of trading!

So is there something like a limit order on ethereum? I&#x27;d like to place a $1 limit order &amp; see if I catch anything.

Oh, wait, Ethereum is not a reliable financial resource? Now that&#x27;s a surprise.

In the normal stock market, this is an action called Taking out the Stops. Market makers can know where stops are placed so they may sell some to get it to hit those prices and have stops automatically trigger

I want nothing more than for Ethereum market to crash and then the people who bought 10+ cards have to sell them and lose money. Then people will be able to get the card for a reasonable price.

&quot;CNBC has been unable to verify the screenshot posted by DeMasie.&quot;<p>It just shows CNBC is not ready for the crypto world. The whole point is the trade info public and distributed.<p>There was a trade for 3809 as the screenshot shows but also other larger trades. At $.10, there was $2,592.33 in trades now worth ~$7.8M.<p>Here are the trades in question:<p>{&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326580,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.10000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;134.00000000&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326579,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.10000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;7203.30515953&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326578,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.10000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;801.00000000&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326577,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.10000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;5060.32727547&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326576,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.10000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;2.87731448&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326575,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.10000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;3809.73327491&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326574,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.10000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;2534.39163532&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326573,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.10000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;50.00000000&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326572,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.10000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;74.77560000&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326571,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.10000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;50.00000000&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326570,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.12000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;220.00047159&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326569,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.12000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;779.99952841&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326568,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.12000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;50.00000000&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326567,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.15000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;295.00000000&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326566,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.15000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;790.93796645&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326565,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.15000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;1728.30611742&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326564,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.15000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;480.75591613&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;} &gt; {&quot;time&quot;:&quot;2017-06-21T19:30:18.05Z&quot;,&quot;trade_id&quot;:6326563,&quot;price&quot;:&quot;0.20000000&quot;,&quot;size&quot;:&quot;0.20000000&quot;,&quot;side&quot;:&quot;buy&quot;}

this is only &quot;possible&quot; because etherium has even less real value than btc.<p>btc still have intrinsic value as it is traded for chinese expating money, scared Venezuelans, American weekend drug users, etc.<p>etherium exists for the sole purpose of playing investing with btc. everyone I know who owns etherium bought after they decided to buy btc and got a price hike on their investment so they flip btc and etherium instead of btc and usd. because they see it as two things that ever goes up. ha.<p>this is the most perfect scenario for a pump and dump. intentional or not.