GDAX has posted an update on their blog explaining exactly what happened today when some Ethereum buy orders were filled for $0.10.
It doesn’t prove or disprove my earlier theory. It is possible , however, that the $0.10 orders came from multiple buyers and not a single person. If that is the case then the sell-off could quite easily have been someone who simply did not know what he/she was doing.
On 21 June 2017 at 12:30pm PT, a multimillion dollar market sell was placed on the GDAX ETH-USD order book. This resulted in orders being filled from $317.81 to $224.48, translating into a book slippage of 29.4%. This slippage started a cascade of approximately 800 stop loss orders and margin funding liquidations, causing ETH to temporarily trade as low as $0.10.
You can read the full blog post here:
https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1
I didn't have any exposure to Ethereum, but this situation ripple across a lot of platforms. I know Coinbase was down, Hashflare is down, my Genesis mining contract is reporting an incorrect balance. It was a shit storm...
Hmmm. I think it is unlikely that they are related. Overall, there has been a good amount of instability for both Ethereum and Bitcoin as the number of transactions has increased, and they have not been able to keep up.
I don’t think this single sell-off is what triggered that or that the networks being slow is what triggered the sell-off. Just coincidental timing