I woke up seeing DEC fall hard only to quickly bounce back. I was first amazed to see down 35% in a matter of a day and thinking Splinterlands fell out of favor overnight. Fortunately after reviewing a bit more I come to believe it was a lack of liquidity that created such a big drop.
In the early hours of 2/14/26 it appears someone or group was selling their DEC in bulk but buyers where not there and price fell.
The bulk selling relative to daily volume appears to be normal therefore I would believe it was bots who held sell orders were quick enough to remove their buy orders and reset lower before the sells went through.
Players need to realize when buy orders has far less liquidity at specific price they may want to hold off selling too much DEC at once. See in chart above and notice an approximate of 167,635.98 DEC with an equivalent of 1011 Hive. This is showing price gap and not wise to sell that much DEC into the market.
A slightly better trade is to use pools and swap between assets. Tribaldex and beeswap.dcity.io are my go to places to access the pools to swap assets. In these pools resources are already in place for players to swap versus buy and sell on the open market such as hive-engine.
Be careful out there as someone or group who threw their entire DEC collection basically took a massive hit in the trades. What they should have done if they wanted to sell on open market is to sell portions rather than all at once. There was not enough buy order volumes to hold up prices and hence the volatility. This momentarily jolted the markets making arbitrage opportunities for those who were awake and trying to buy low. I missed out but here to post it since it happened recently.
Like the old saying volatile markets make huge opportunities to profit. This is a great example of what not to do.
Thanks for reading this post.
