How this trader exploited a New Year glitch on Binance to make $1.5 million in a day
The weird 4 AM buy wall
On New Year’s Day at an ungodly 4 AM, a trader who goes by Vida noticed something that made his trading alarm bells blare: the order book for a tiny token called BROCCOLI714 suddenly had a monster of a buy wall. We’re talking roughly $26 million worth of buy orders clustered within a tight range on the spot market for a token whose circulating supply was tiny by comparison. It was bizarre, obvious, and smelled like either a very confused whale or a buggy algorithm with a shopping habit.
Vida had been running a pretty normal-looking funding-rate arbitrage — short about $500k on perpetual futures while holding a hedged long in spot to collect funding fees. That steady, yawn-inducing strategy turned into chaos when the spot leg ballooned to around $800k while the futures side barely moved. Closing immediately would’ve locked in a tidy profit, but the whole scene felt off. Genuine big players don’t just wave $26 million on the bid like a banner. Something else was clearly going on.
Sniping, circuit breakers, and the $1.5M finale
What made the moment extra juicy was how exchanges’ protections intervened. Binance’s risk engine capped futures prices while the spot market rocketed, creating a huge, artificial gap between the two. That’s when Vida changed gears: instead of staying neutral, he started sniping short bursts of long exposure every few seconds, betting that the exchange’s volatility protections would lift briefly and he could ride the pump.
He managed to stack roughly $200k of fresh longs at about $0.046 as the spot price climbed. When Binance’s automated systems and whatever was controlling that giant buy wall started flickering, Vida knew the window wouldn’t last forever. He sold out of everything in a single, sweaty-minute exit around 4:20 AM — liquidating original hedges and the speculative longs — and walked away with a massive win. Ten minutes later, the $26 million buy wall finally disappeared. The fake support evaporated and the token collapsed.
Seeing the support vanish confirmed his suspicion that the whole thing was temporary, so Vida flipped and opened a sizable short (about $400k) at roughly $0.065. Gravity did the rest: the token cratered toward the low-$0.02s and he covered the short. From an initial capital base in the ballpark of $400k, Vida turned the sequence of pump, freeze, and dump into roughly $1.5 million in realized gains. Wild? Absolutely. Illegal? Hard to say from the outside; messy? Definitely.
Why this felt like a glitch — and why it matters
There are a few ways this could have gone down: a hacked account blasting orders, a broken market-making algo, or somebody accidentally (or intentionally) flaming cash at an illiquid token. According to Vida, the exchange’s quick internal look didn’t find definitive evidence of a hack — which shifts the story toward malfunction or human error.
Whatever the cause, this episode highlights some quirks of modern crypto markets: automated risk controls can create sudden, extreme price gaps across venues; huge visible orders can act like a fake parachute that others can temporarily ride; and a few minutes of weirdness can transfer fortunes between players who were paying attention and those who weren’t. For anyone who isn’t watching the book at 4 AM, it’s a reminder that the market is a strange, sometimes merciless place — and that timing, speed, and a little audacity can turn chaos into profit.