Observers have questioned what happened. It's possible that the holder, who had not been active on-chain since 2020, was simply unaware of the slippage risk. It's also possible that it was a "fat-finger" trade — that the trader accidentally selected the wrong stablecoin from a list of similarly named options, some of which could have more easily absorbed a trade of that size.
Cardano holder loses $6 million to slippage
A holder of around 14.4 million ADA (~$6.9 million), the token for the Cardano network, made an expensive error when attempting to swap the tokens for a stablecoin. Because the stablecoin they were looking to buy is lightly used and has only around $10.6 million tokens in circulation, an attempt to purchase millions of the tokens on the market caused the dollar-pegged stablecoin's price to spike to around $1.26. The resulting slippage meant that the trader spent their roughly $6.9 million in tokens to receive a little less than $850,000 in the USDA stablecoin, meaning the trader essentially threw away $6 million.