Here’s a one-hour chart from yesterday (June 21) –
A low of 10 cents! 
This article provides more analysis on what happened and the effects particularly for margin traders Here’s How Traders Lost Millions in the First Ethereum Flash Crash - Motherboard
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@FOREX.com, thanks for the link. Any plans on offering the ability to trade cryptocurrencies on your platform?
haha - And that’s why it will never work as a ‘real world’ currency - a perfect example.
A flash crash 99.97% of it’s own value is just ridiculous. It’s clear how unstable these cryptocurrencies are - just the next tulip boom & bust
@ForexGump, not at this time.
Our focus is on offering margin trading (AKA trading with leverage) on the most liquid currencies (along with CFDs outside the US). The key word here is “liquid”.
“There was approximately $1.54 trillion in circulation as of April 5, 2017, of which $1.49 trillion was in Federal Reserve notes.” The Fed - How much U.S. currency is in circulation?
By contrast, the total market capitalization of Bitcoin is about $44 billion dollars, and the market cap of Ethereum is about $30 billion dollars at the time of this post: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/views/all/
Is it any wonder then that a multi-million dollar sell order could trigger a flash crash in Ethereum?
Even before this latest incident, we’ve seen the price of Bitcoin recently drop more than 16% in one day: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/12/now-bitcoin-is-crashing-along-with-the-drop-in-technology-stocks.html
On such a price move in Bitcoin, someone trading on margin could see their account wiped out using only 6:1 leverage. By contrast, the average daily volatility in EUR/USD is 0.63% at the time of this post: https://www.mataf.net/en/forex/tools/volatility
That’s why FOREX.com can offer up to 50:1 leverage in the US (in compliance with CFTC regulations) and even higher outside the US for major currencies (less for exotic currencies).
Leverage magnifies gains and losses, so it’s important to evaluate the volatility in price for a particular currency before trading it with leverage. This is exponentially true for cryptocurrencies as we have seen recently!
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That should say $44 and $30 billion, I think.
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Looks like the exchange performed as it should have. This is what you get when somebody trys to sell a multi-million position at market prices. Lucky if you got in at those low prices though.
Knowing the typical liquidity available on their exchange, should GDAX have set order size limits to prevent such a large order from being placed?
By contrast, after what seems to have been a $2 billion “fat finger” on gold, the price “suddenly plunged $18, or as much as 1.6%, to $1,236 an ounce” highlighting the dramatic difference in liquidity between gold and etherium: Gold Flash Crashes As “Someone” Dumps $2 Billion, “Fat Finger” Blamed | Zero Hedge
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Here’s a question. Why does a ‘fat finger trade’ always move price to the down side in a flash crash. I’ve never seen the opposite with intense buying.
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A search for “fat finger surge price” yielded the following article about HSBC stock rising after such an incident: ‘Fat finger’ trade seen costly after HSBC price spike | Reuters
A trader may have lost about 400,000 pounds ($662,100) in under 30 seconds on Thursday after causing a 10 percent spike in the shares of Europe’s biggest bank, HSBC (HSBA.L), which traders blamed on human error - a “fat finger” trade.
The jump in the price - a seismic move in a company worth nearly 120 billion pounds - prompted a “circuit-breaker” to kick in and suspend HSBC shares from trading for five minutes, after which an orderly market in its shares resumed.
It’s worth noting the market cap of HSBC referenced in the article is greater than the combined market caps of both Bitcoin and Etherium currently. The article also mentions a “circuit-breaker” which is another safety measure GDAX may want to consider for their Etherium exchange.
That would have been nice I think. 
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