A dormant Cardano wallet has become the center of one of the network’s most expensive trading mishaps this year after torching more than $6 million in a single, catastrophic swap routed through an illiquid stablecoin pool.

The long-inactive address — silent since September 2020 — suddenly reappeared on-chain Sunday and exchanged 14.4 million ADA (about $6.9 million) for just 847,695 USDA, a micro-cap Cardano-native dollar stablecoin. The transaction, first spotted by on-chain analyst ZachXBT in their Telegram channel, amounted to one of the most severe slippage events recorded on Cardano in 2025.

The trader effectively paid more than $8 per USDA, an astonishing premium for a token intended to hold a $1 peg and currently valued at only around $10.6 million in total market cap. The swap instantly erased roughly $6.05 million in value.

Because USDA has extremely thin liquidity across Cardano DEXs, the whale-sized order violently pushed the token’s price to nearly $1.26, CoinGecko data shows. USDA briefly floated above its peg before drifting back toward $1.04 once liquidity pools normalized after the trade finished filling.

The wallet had no previous interaction with USDA, leaving open the possibility of a fat-finger mistake, a misinterpreted ticker, or an assumption that the pool could absorb a large market-style order. The Cardano ecosystem has several similarly named USD-linked assets, making the ticker-confusion theory plausible.

The episode underscores a well-known but often ignored rule among sophisticated traders: never push size through illiquid pools without strict slippage protection. Automated market makers can only price trades based on available depth, and multimillion-dollar orders can obliterate a pool’s opposing side in seconds if liquidity is sparse.

Incidents like this have cropped up in past cycles across multiple networks, with traders losing seven figures due to incorrect tickers, zero-liquidity pools, and over-aggressive aggregator routing.

On Cardano, however, this event is drawing particular attention because the wallet had been dormant for nearly five years — only to awaken and vaporize millions in a single mispriced swap.

For veteran on-chain participants, it’s a sober reminder that even long-sleeping capital can stumble into modern liquidity traps, and that decentralized execution remains ruthlessly unforgiving when size, speed and slippage collide.