Crypto Corner: When whales turn, you may get beached
On a Saturday night in July, South Africans were fresh from a Springbok victory against Georgia through some Boan Venter heroics and we were settling in to watch the Junior Boks win the World Rugby U20 Championship.
Around that time, crypto charts on Luno got hit by a wave they didn't see coming. Every crypto-rand trading pair, including stablecoins, crashed up to 25% in less than 20 minutes. Then prices bounced back like nothing happened. Globally, seas were steady. Locally? A tempest.
Luno later explained: no glitch, no hack, just one 'very high-volume transaction' at a time when liquidity was thin. No malice. Just a whale making a splash in a shallow pool that triggered stop-losses, panic selling and real losses.
Read more: Inside South Africa's crypto market — the Luno crash that wasn't
That's the risk of trading on local exchanges with open order books. Prices aren't pegged to global averages, but determined by supply and demand on the platform itself. If one big fish dumps a lot of crypto and there aren't enough buyers, prices nosedive. The market didn't crash. Your platform did.
Now that same risk follows investors into the world of tokenised stocks. Both VALR and Luno have launched tokenised stock trading, offering price exposure to Apple, Nvidia, Tesla and the S&P 500, all using rands. It's pitched as democratising access to global markets.
And it is. You can buy a sliver of Nvidia (fractional ownership) for less than the price of a Nando's whole chicken (R199 in case you were wondering).
But you're not buying actual shares. You're buying a blockchain-based token that cosplays as a share. No voting rights. No dividends. Just price exposure.
And, crucially, you're still trading on the exchange. That means the same risks apply.
A whale move in a low-liquidity moment could still mess with your tokenised stock price. And if you're using instant buy or sell, you're likely trading against the house, which profits from local price anomalies.
Crypto promised decentralisation. But these platforms are centralised chokepoints where your fate is tied to their liquidity, their rules and, sometimes, their profit models.
So if you're dabbling in tokenised assets, whether it's bitcoin or Berkshire Hathaway, remember: it's not just about the asset, it's about the pond you're swimming in. And when a whale turns, even a stablecoin can capsize. DM
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
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