Global Digital Asset Exchange (formerly Coinbase Wallets) provides Coinbase wallet owners with an exchange interface for bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading. GDAX offers fiat to cryptocurrency pairings to traders in 32 different countries, with Coinbase offering simple bitcoin transactions and storage services to 190 nations.
On Wednesday reports surfaced of traders losing extreme amounts money during violent slippage on GDAX’s ETH-USD market.
Vice president of GDAX, Adam White, has blamed the crash on a multimillion dollar sell order that apparently drove prices from $317.81 to $244.48, resulting in an instantaneous $29.4% loss of value. The order then triggered approximately 800 stop losses, seeing widespread liquidations among traders in leveraged positions.
Read more here: https://news.bitcoin.com/gdax-exchange-sees-colossal-eth-flash-crash-angered-traders-mount-lawsuit/
Wow. Time to buy.
Many warnings to inexperienced traders and holding margin accounts here on Steemit. Coinbase would be last exchange I'd hold margin. Hopefully their first loss is their smartest loss.
I have read all over the place about this incident. Still I am not sure this is something that happened naturally, I mean... this is something that can happen in trading scenarios, or if this was all planned by some people trying to manipulate the market for their own benefit.
Anyone mind shedding some light on the topic?
Much appreciated! Thanks! :D
I'm starting to have little trust in shaking hands the more and more people get into this cryptocurrency space. seems anything that can be done, will be done. it's going to be volatile as hell!
From what I've gathered on this incident, there wasn't any wrong-doing/illegal activity that took place. Someone simply took advantage of the stop loss order function on GDAX by selling off a large number of Eth in order to drive the price down, which would then trigger the users who had set a stop loss order to sell their Eth at severely undervalued prices. Then whoever was responsible for the massive sale of Eth was apparently then ready to buy that Eth back at the discounted price to make a quick fortune.