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Tech

This Guy Made a Big Red Button to Instantly Sell Cryptocurrency During a Crash

Why hodl when you can smash the sell button?

If you’re among the “criminals, idealists and speculators” trading in the notoriously volatile cryptocurrency market, you might have experienced a time when you wished for a fast, satisfying way to sell off all your assets in exchange for some real-life dollars during a price crash.

Ilker Dagli—a system and network administrator at Near East University in North Cyprus and creator of a literal valve that throttles internet access—made a physical button you can smash to sell off all your cryptocurrency at once.

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“I decided to invent this button because I saw lots of investors of cryptocurrency [with] complaints about exchange issues, especially when the price falls very quick,” Dagli told me in an email. “As you know, cryptocurrency markets are so volatile.”

When the price dips fast, investors often can’t manually close their orders and sell all their assets fast enough to stop their losses. Because of this, some exchanges—like GDAX—have a feature that lets traders set a rule where if the price drops to a specified value, the system places an order that sells the trader’s assets.

Clearly, what this process is missing is a big, red button. When you press Dagli’s button, it cancels all of your orders and sells off your coins at market price. Daglit demonstrated it working on his Binance stash in a video.

“I had some coins and orders on my Binance account, when I pressed the button it immediately cancelled all my orders and sold all my coins” he said. “So I became 'safe'. Hassle free. No need to login to exchange, cancel all orders manually then sell all my coins one by one… Just press the emergency button!

Dagli designed the button for Binance, but says it would work with any exchange that has an open API. Not that the coin you’re holding will ever need it.