Ethereum Flash Crash Sends Price Under $950 on Uniswap

With Ethereum’s price down nearly 20% over the past day and hovering around the $1,200 mark this morning, many crypto investors and industry watchers are bracing themselves for a historic drop back into triple digits.

But it already happened late last night on decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap, albeit briefly, with the price of ETH hitting $950 after a whale dumped more than 65,000 ETH into the market.

It was widely spotted on Crypto Twitter, as that price was significantly lower than the spot rate on other exchanges, where the price hovered around $1,300 at the time. However, it proved to be a brief flash crash for Uniswap, and the price rebounded in line with the rest of the market.

Apparently, the momentary sub-$1,000 drop for ETH was primarily triggered by the aforementioned sale, which spanned both Uniswap and rival DEX SushiSwap.

The transaction saw 65,104 ETH sold from a vault on DeFi app Oasis, with an average sell price of nearly $1,156 per ETH. All told, that’s over $75 million in ETH sold at that price. The ETH was sold for stacks of dollar-pegged stablecoins, including DAI, USDC, and USDT.

Mariano Conti, an angel investor and Ethereum project advisor, tweeted that the investor was apparently selling off the large trove of ETH to “pay off debt and decrease their risk” on DeFi lending platform MakerDAO—perhaps to cover a loan that was about to be liquidated.

However, by moving such a large amount of ETH in a single transaction, the seller apparently got a less-than-desirable price. As the Oasis vault data shows, the oracle price for ETH at the time was more than $200 higher than the average sell price in the transaction. The seller also paid nearly $152,000 in fees to Oasis with the transaction.

Just a few hours later, the same Oasis vault owner sold another 27,947 ETH at an average price of $1,181 each—another $33 million worth of ETH at that price. Again, the seller took a low price compared to what the oracle said was the market value at the time, which was $1,335.

At a current price around $1,220 as of this writing, per data from CoinMarketCap, Ethereum has shed nearly 20% of its price over the last 24 hours, and 34% in the past week. It’s now down 75% from its all-time high of nearly $4,892 from November 2021.

Top cryptocurrency Bitcoin is also down significantly of late, but the news isn’t quite so bad: it’s down 17% today and 25% over the past week. At its current price of $23,366, Bitcoin has fallen 66% from its own all-time high price of nearly $68,790 set last November.