June 22, 2017

Like a few others, I was watching the Ethereum trading price yesterday on a couple of different websites. I happened to flip over to my open Coinbase tab and briefly saw the price dip into the low $70 range. The price recovered within a few moments and I wasn't too surprised because there was already network latency attributed to the Civic Initial Coin Offering (ICO).

Ethereum: June 21, 2017 flash crash Coinbase Chart
Full disclosure: I did not make the screengrab because of the flash crash, I thought it was remarkable that the index was stuck at about $301.00 for almost four hours.

Adam White, on the GDAX blog reports:

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.
[...]
.... 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.
"ETH-USD Trading Update"

Oscar Williams-Grut wrote an overview piece in Business Insider, "Ethereum had a flash crash — here's what happened" on June 22.

Also on the 22nd, TrustNodes reports that some Ethereum did in fact change hands at 10 cents per coin.

Coinbase stated their preliminary investigation shows there was no wrongdoing, but they continue to investigate, halting trading until they are sure “all systems were operating correctly.”

To those who lost funds, Coinbase stated “our matching engine operated as intended throughout this event and trading with advanced features like margin always carries inherent risk.”

But there was reward too as someone turned $350 into a million by being able to buy at 10 cent as shown by screenshots of the order book at the time of the events:

"Someone Sold $30 Million Worth of Eth, Sending Price to $0.10 Temporarily"

Update:

A reader on the Facebook Ethereum forum posted this transaction link yesterday.

https://etherscan.io/address/0x7d551397f79a2988b064afd0efebee802c7721bc

The transaction occurred at Jun-21-2017 06:59:33 PM +UTC, which is 11:59:33 a.m. Wednesday June 21, 2017 in America/Los_Angeles. (hat/tip to timezoneconverter.com) Adam White indicates the large sale on GDAX occurred June 21, 2017 at 12:30pm PT.

The 39,300 ETH ($12.7 million) transaction, appears to be from GENESIS and is labeled with something called a RelaySafeSplit. The account funds are drawn from an address prefixed with GENESIS ("GENESIS_7d55139..."), with 39,400 ETH from Block 0 as the opening entry.

The RelaySafeSplit is apparently a housekeeping routine used to split Ethereum (ETH) & Ethereum Classic (ETC) due to the earlier Fork. There was a smaller transaction of the same type of 5 ETH in the prior transaction, about 3 1/2 minutes earlier at, Jun-21-2017 06:56:08 PM +UTC.

Referencing the screen grab I provided above, the Coinbase chart returned to $301.00 by 1:12pm PT (8:12pm UTC / GMT).

Are you HODL, or SODL?