A dormant cardano wallet just vaporized more than $6 million in a single exchange after executing one of the most extreme slippage events the network has seen this year.
The holder—whose address has not shown any activity since September 2020—reappeared on-chain Sunday and exchanged 14.4 million ADA (worth about $6.9 million) for just 847,695 USDA, a little-known cardano-native dollar stablecoin.
The trade was first flagged by in-chain investigator ZachXBT on their Telegram Channel.
The user effectively pays more than $ 8 per USDA in execution – a disastrous price, given that the USDA is supposed to be pegged close to $ 1 and has a market cap of only around $ 10.6 million. The transaction immediately cleared around $6.05 million worth.
With only the thin on-chain depth available, the order ripped the price of StableCoin to about $1.26 on Cardano Dexs, according to Coingecko. The USDA briefly floated above the PEG before retracing to around $1.04, as liquidity normalized once the whale-sized clearing ended.
The address has no prior history with the USDA, making it unclear whether the user made a mistake, confused the stablecoin ticker, or assumed liquidity would hold for a market-order style swap. A wrong choice of ticker can happen—USDA is not widely traded, and the Cardano ecosystem has many USD-denominated assets with similar tickers.
The episode is a textbook example of why big traders avoid bad pools and never size the route through automatic market makers without slippage checks. Even a few million dollars in ADA can overwhelm decentralized liquidity if opposing sides of the pool are underfunded.
In past cycles, traders have repeatedly lost seven-figures due to incorrect tickers, zero-liquid pools, or overly aggressive market orders executed through aggregates.
In Cardano, the mistake was surprising through business circles not because it involved StableCoin, but because the wallet did not fail for five years – only to reawaken and burn millions in a false false exchange.
It makes for a reminder that dormant capital can still meet modern liquidity traps, and on-chain execution remains unforgiving in size, speed, and slip.
