Very Expensive Mistake: WAVES Flash Crash By 99.9% To 10 Satoshi On Binance

Popular cryptocurrency WAVES experienced a sudden flash crash which drove its prices ridiculously low. In other words, if you had your orders placed that low, you could have banked an increase of about 5200% instantly.

WAVES Flash Crashes, Loses 99.9% In an Instant

WAVES Platform is currently the 29th largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization. It is trading at around $2.65, which marks a very slight increase in the past three months.

More interestingly, however, the cryptocurrency went through the so-called flash crash. A sell order, probably ‘market’ with no limit price, for 506,000 WAVES was executed, dragging its price to as low as 0.0000001 BTC (or $0.00052), as seen on the chart below. The sell-off almost cleared the entire order-book of the WAVES/BTC trading pair on Binance exchange. 

The price has immediately recovered, and WAVES is back up, trading at 0.0052 BTC on Binance at the time of this writing.

What this means is that if anyone had their orders placed anywhere in that spectrum, could have made massive profits. Those who had buy orders at the lowest point could have netted up to 5200 percent on their investment, as the price has since recovered.

What’s a Flash Crash?

In the general sense of the phrase, a flash crash is observed when there is an extremely rapid decline in the price of a traded asset, in this case – the cryptocurrency WAVES, creating a huge wick in the chart’s candle. The reasons could be many, including the cash out of funds and even a crypto whale making a mistake in placing his sell order, in this case a mistake in placing one “0” can drive a 10% command value of the intended order.

What is certain is that we’ve seen this before. Cryptopotato reported back in December that a similar flash crash took place with Ethereum, dragging its price to as little as $13,05, while it was trading a little above $100. It took place on Coinbase Pro (former GDAX).  

As we have mentioned in our Bitcoin and Altcoin trading tips, placing low orders could sometimes turn out to be particularly wise:

A successful strategy regarding this is placing very low buy orders. About a week ago a crazy dump occurred, selling off Augor coin down to 25% of its value! After a short while the market recovered slightly and anyone who had low buy these low orders could easily double or triple their investment. Placing buy orders requires special care, don’t wake up when you’re far away from the market to find your buy order is suddenly higher than the current market price.