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by vii 3277 days ago
It seems that the price plummet only occurred on the GDAX ETH-USD market. Even the GDAX BTC-ETH market hasn't the spike. Normally there are many bots ferrying liquidity between these markets so this suggests that the ETH-USD market was not giving willing traders a chance to place orders. Their first blog post indicated it was working perfectly, in which case a design rethink is in order.

Coinbase regularly goes down when there is heavy trading. Very decent of them to publicly refund people for this incident, but given they have regular Ethereum trading issues, they should be quicker to suspend their market and more humble about the technical issues they're facing
1 comments
modeless 3277 days ago
This was not a technical issue. Everything worked exactly as designed. A large market sell order reduced the price to a level that triggered other sell orders (a combination of "stop-loss" and forced liquidation for margin positions) in a cascade. This was a flash crash that was over within a few seconds, so other markets did not react.

The issue is that there are a lot of inexperienced traders on GDAX right now and they were recklessly trading on margin and/or setting stop-loss orders without understanding the possible consequences.

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vii 3276 days ago
During the crash, if the market were functioning normally, people could have bought cheap ETH in the ETH-USD market and sold it at nearly the normal price via the ETH-USD and BTC-USD markets all without leaving GDAX. Their outage page has the grace to mention that there were slowdowns.

A few seconds is normally long enough for liquidity to transfer between markets and this time it wasn't. That's the issue

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