Sell orders instantly canceled

Alpaca Account Troubleshooting
1

I’m trying to understand an incident in my paper trading account where I was unable to close an ETH/USD crypto position for several hours. BTC/USD trading was working flawlessly during this period. My system submitted repeated market sell orders to close the position, but they were canceled almost immediately. I also tried to liquidate the position manually from the Alpaca dashboard, and that failed as well. Eventually, after more attempts, a sell order did fill and the position was exited. I have executed hundreds (thousands?) of orders with this system on paper trading over the past month or so and have yet to experience anything like this.

This was paper trading, but I’m concerned because the behavior looked like a close/liquidation path failure rather than a normal market/liquidity issue.

One example canceled order:

Symbol: ETH/USD
Asset class: crypto
Order ID: ccd7d6c1-8c2d-4b6d-a1b2-7b52b7835e37
Side: sell
Type: market
Quantity: 3.493822691
Time in force: gtc
Status: canceled

Created at:   2026-05-01T00:40:52.085496Z
Submitted at: 2026-05-01T00:40:52.085496Z
Canceled at:  2026-05-01T00:40:52.089498Z
Updated at:   2026-05-01T00:40:52.110145Z

The order was canceled about 4 ms after submission. I saw over sell orders repeatedly canceled while trying to close the trade.

Questions:

  • Why would a paper crypto market sell order for ETH/USD with time_in_force=gtc be canceled almost immediately?
  • Why would manual liquidation from the Alpaca dashboard fail for the same position?
  • What is the recommended close-position sequence for crypto positions in paper trading? Should I cancel all open ETH/USD orders, wait until their status is fully canceled, then submit a single market or marketable limit order?
  • Are there any hidden cancel reasons or backend logs you can check for the listed order ID?

Thank you!