Yesterday a multimillion dollar market sell was placed on the GDAX Ethereum-US Dollar order book, translating into a book slippage.
This slippage started a chain reaction! 800 stop loss orders and margin funding liquidations, causing Ethereum to temporarily trade as low as $0.10!!!!!
People lost a lot of money (reddit)!!:
"So I had a stop order at 316, when GDAX went down (for whatever reason) all my ether was sold at the highest (at the time) price available. When I logged in I saw a small USD amount, I though it was a hiccup. Checked the fills and indeed it was sold at 10 cents. There is no way this will be reversed right? If that's the case I believe I will be leaving the crypto market at least until it stabilizes."
Just lost 3k in the blink of an eye.
Adam White, VP at GDAX states that:
''Our initial investigations show no indication of wrongdoing or account takeovers''
"We understand this event can be frustrating for our customers. Our matching engine operated as intended throughout this event and trading with advanced features like margin always carries inherent risk."
"We are continuing to conduct a thorough investigation and will keep customers updated with any resulting actions. With that in mind, it is important to note that these trades are final in accordance with our GDAX Trading Rules (Section 3.1). Honoring properly executed orders is critical to maintaining the integrity of an exchange."
"In response to the large price movement we decided to temporarily halt trading of ETH-USD. Once we confirmed all systems were operating correctly, we restored trading in accordance with our Downtime Process (Section 5)."
Sources: https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/6iokzy/gdax_just_sold_a_good_chunk_of_my_ether_at_10/