If you were trading on Ethereum using any Leverage yesterday and woke up today to see you got a margin call wondering what happened, here is the explanation. Someone with a massive holding of ETH cashed out on GDAX, the institutional exchange of platform of Coinbase. In online cryptocurrency community forums some people suspect it was a person related to one of the latest massive ICOs.
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Adam White, Head of GDAX, explained the situation:
"On 21 June 2017 at 12:30pm PT, a multimillion dollar market sell was placed on the GDAX ETH-USD order book. This resulted in orders being filled from $317.81 to $224.48, translating into a book Slippage of 29.4%. This slippage started a cascade of approximately 800 stop loss orders and margin funding liquidations, causing ETH to temporarily trade as low as $0.10.
Adam White
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."
