Last night (December 30), the cryptocurrency TAKE experienced a rapid plunge. In just 10 minutes, the price dropped from approximately $0.32 to $0.11116, eventually stabilizing around $0.12298, a decline of over 70%. This was not a market-wide crash but a crisis unique to this small to mid-cap altcoin.

At first glance, it seemed like a flash crash, but project team and market analysis point to more complex reasons. First, it’s important to understand that as a mid-sized crypto asset, TAKE’s market depth is inherently limited. Coupled with the quiet trading during the year-end holiday, liquidity was already under pressure. When a large sell order hit the market, leverage liquidations and stop-loss orders were automatically triggered, creating a vicious cycle — the more the price fell, the more liquidations occurred, ultimately forming a self-reinforcing downward spiral. This kind of "liquidity waterfall" is common in the 24-hour crypto markets without circuit breakers, where large sell orders can instantly amplify volatility, causing prices to evaporate rapidly.

On the technical side, there were also issues. The Overtake platform experienced server failures on December 29-30, with the website temporarily down, affecting user access and content availability. Although the team quickly fixed the problem through system upgrades and backups, this window was enough to exacerbate market panic. When infrastructure instability is combined with liquidity exhaustion, it’s not surprising that investor confidence can collapse instantly. The project team denied the possibility of a hacking attack, emphasizing that this was a market mechanism issue rather than malicious manipulation — a conclusion that holds up from a technical perspective.