If you've traded crypto for long enough, you've probably noticed something: most blowups aren't about calling the market direction wrong. Nope. It's always the tiny stuff that catches you off guard.

A price feed stutters for half a second. Data from one blockchain lags by a few ticks. Some low-liquidity pool gets hit with a whale trade and the reference price goes haywire. These sound like nothing. But they're everything.

That's when the cascade starts—liquidations trigger, margin positions collapse, and suddenly you're watching your account evaporate in real time. Later, when everyone's doing the post-mortem, it all gets lumped under "extreme market conditions" or "unforeseen volatility."

But here's the thing: it wasn't unforeseen. It was inevitable. These breakdown points are baked into how markets actually work, especially when liquidity thins out or multiple chains interact with each other. The system stresses, data gets janky, and if you're over-leveraged or holding the wrong position, you catch the blast.

The traders who survive these moments aren't the ones with perfect predictions. They're the ones paranoid enough to account for the possibility that something, somewhere, might glitch at the worst possible time.