A dormant Cardano wallet just vaporized over $6 million on a single exchange after executing one of the most extreme slippage 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 and exchanged 14.4 million ADA (worth approximately $6.9 million) for just 847,695 USDA, a little-known native Cardano dollar stablecoin.
The exchange was first pointed out by network researcher ZachXBT on his Telegram channel.
The user effectively paid over $8 per USDA at the time of execution, a disastrous price given that USDA is supposedly pegged at around $1 and has a market capitalization of only about $10.6 million. The transaction instantly ended up being worth around $6.05 million.
With only a small amount of on-chain depth available, the order raised the price of the stablecoin to nearly $1.26 on Cardano DEX, according to CoinGecko. USDA briefly floated above parity before retreating to around $1.04, as liquidity normalized once the whale-sized order finished liquidating.
The address had no history with the USDA, so it is unclear whether the user misclicked, confused the stablecoin symbol, or assumed liquidity would be maintained for a market order style exchange. The wrong ticker may have been chosen: USDA is not widely traded and the Cardano ecosystem has multiple dollar-denominated assets with similar tickers.
The episode is a textbook example of why great traders avoid illiquid pools and never route sizing through automated market makers without slider controls. Even a few million dollars in ADA can overwhelm decentralized liquidity if the opposite side of the fund 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 bug is reverberating through trading circles not because of the stablecoin involved, but because the wallet had been untouched for five years, only to wake up and burn millions on a single exchange at the wrong price.
This is a stark reminder that idle capital can still face modern liquidity traps, and that on-chain execution remains unforgiving with size, speed, and errors.
