After roughly five years of total inactivity, a long-silent wallet suddenly executed a multimillion-dollar transaction that wiped out nearly its entire value in one blow.
On-chain researcher ZachXBT, who spotted the movement, reported that the whale converted 14.4 million ADA into 847,000 USDA, the Cardano-based stablecoin. In theory, it should have been a simple rotation of capital. In practice, it was a disaster.
Rather than splitting the swap or checking pool depth, the transaction was pushed through in a single batch. The problem: USDA markets are still thin. The enormous order detonated the price ratio inside the pool, causing ADA to tank and USDA to surge within the trade itself. By the time the swap finalized, the wallet effectively ate around $6.05 million in slippage.
ZachXBT called it “the unluckiest trade of the month,” highlighting how whales can suffer catastrophic losses by forcing oversized trades into shallow liquidity.
The whale’s mistake happened in a hostile environment. ADA’s price is already fragile:
With sentiment weak and volatility elevated, the market had zero buffer to absorb a giant swap without breaking price mechanics internally.
Part of the damage stems from the scale mismatch. USDA’s circulating supply is only about 10 million tokens, and liquidity remains concentrated in a handful of pools. Under those conditions, even a fraction of the whale’s 14.4 million ADA stack would have moved the market — but sending the full amount through in one click made the loss inevitable.
The episode has now sparked widespread conversation across the Cardano community. Not about hacks or exploits — but about self-inflicted losses. As DeFi grows more complex, the greatest risk for large wallets is not always the market… sometimes it’s the trader.
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