A dormant Cardano wallet just vaporized more than $6 million in a single swap after performing one of the most extreme slip events the network has seen this year.
The holder — whose address had not shown any activity since September 2020 — reappeared on the chain on Sunday, exchanging 14.4 million ADA (worth about $6.9 million) for just 847,695 USDA, a little-known Cardano-native stablecoin.
The trade was first flagged by on-chain investigator ZachXBT in their Telegram channel.
The user actually paid more than $8 per USDA on execution – a disastrous price since the USDA is supposed to be pegged at $1 and has a market cap of only about $10.6 million. The transaction instantly wiped out about $6.05 million in value.
With only a thin on-chain depth available, the order ripped the stablecoin’s price to nearly $1.26 on Cardano DEXs, according to CoinGecko. USDA briefly hovered above peg before returning to approx. $1.04 as liquidity normalized once the whale-sized order completed clearing.
The address had no previous history with the USDA, making it unclear whether the user misclicked, confused the stablecoin ticker, or assumed liquidity would hold for a market order-style swap. A wrong choice of ticker is plausible – USDA is not widely traded and the Cardano ecosystem has several USD-denominated assets with similar tickers.
The episode is a textbook example of why large traders avoid illiquid pools and never route size through automated market makers without slipchecks. 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 figures due to incorrect tickers, zero liquidity pools or overly aggressive market orders executed through aggregators.
On Cardano, the mistake is reverberating through trading circles, not because of the stablecoin involved, but because the wallet had been untouched for five years — only to revive and burn millions in a single mispriced swap.
It provides a stark reminder that dormant capital can still face modern liquidity traps, and that on-chain execution remains unforgiving in terms of size, speed and slippage.
