Slippage Doesn’t Care How Experienced You Are

Blockchain researcher ZachXBT has called out "onchain clown of the month": a user who swapped 14.4 million ADA for USDA on a decentralized exchange and ended up losing 90% of the value - roughly $6.2 million - purely because of slippage.

But there’s nothing funny about it. The person who made this trade has been dealing with ADA for at least five years - that’s when these coins first appeared on their address. In other words, this wasn’t a newcomer making a rookie mistake. It shows that even experienced users can take a massive loss when swapping large amounts in decentralized liquidity pools.

And this risk grows with the size of the swap. In AMMs, small amounts usually go through with minimal slippage, even when liquidity isn’t great. But the larger the trade, the bigger the slippage - and the larger the loss. That’s why doing a small “test swap” is pointless: it will execute perfectly, but tells you nothing about what will happen with a real-size trade. That’s exactly what this user did, and it didn’t help.

The user here is not a clown at all. DeFi is a brilliant concept, but in situations like this it can fail anyone.

Large swaps are far safer on rabbit.io. Even big trades won’t move the price the way they do in AMMs. And if you choose the fixed-rate mode, you can be sure the rate won’t move by a single cent, satoshi, or lovelace - no matter what happens.