A dormant Cardano wallet just vaporized over $6 million in a single trade after executing one of the most extreme slippage events the network has seen this year.
The holder – whose address had shown no activity since September 2020 – reappeared on-chain on Sunday and exchanged 14.4 million ADA (worth approximately $6.9 million) for just 847,695 USDA, a little-known dollar stablecoin from Cardano.
The exchange was first reported by on-chain investigator ZachXBT on his Telegram channel.
The user effectively paid over $8 per USDA upon execution – a disastrous price, considering that USDA is supposedly pegged at almost $1 and its market cap is only around $10.6 million. The transaction instantly erased a value of approximately $6.05 million.
With only a small amount of chain depth available, the order caused the price of the stablecoin to rise to nearly $1.26 on the Cardano DEX, according to CoinGecko. The USDA briefly floated above the benchmark rate before falling back to around $1.04 as liquidity normalized once the whale-sized order ended.
The address had no history with the USDA, making it difficult to know whether the user misclicked, confused the stablecoin ticker, or assumed the liquidity would be valid for a market order-style swap. An incorrect ticker choice is plausible: USDA is not widely traded and the Cardano ecosystem has several USD-denominated assets with similar tickers.
This episode is a classic example of why large traders avoid illiquid pools and never route size through automated market makers without slippage controls. Even a few million dollars in ADA can overwhelm decentralized liquidity if the opposite side of the pool is barely funded.
In previous cycles, traders have repeatedly lost seven-digit figures due to bad tickers, zero-liquidity pools, or overly aggressive market orders executed through aggregators.
On Cardano, the error is reverberating through trading circles, not because of the stablecoin involved, but because the wallet has been sitting untouched for five years – only to wake up and burn millions in a single mispriced exchange.
This is a stark reminder that dormant capital can still cope with modern liquidity traps and that on-chain execution remains unforgiving in terms of size, speed and slippage.
