Chip stock perpetuals lose $51.6M in ten minutes while Wall Street is shut

About $51.6 million of chip stock perpetuals positions were force-closed in ten minutes on Saturday evening, between 21:22 and 21:32 UTC on 17 October, while Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange were shut. The contracts track SanDisk, Micron, SK Hynix and the leveraged chip fund SOXL, and they trade around the clock on Binance and on trade.xyz, the largest stock-perp market built on the Hyperliquid blockchain. The liquidation total comes from CoinGlass data reported by CoinDesk, which says about $38 million of it hit traders betting on higher prices.

None of the reports Coindaro reviewed ties the drop to company news. The selling started on Binance and reached Hyperliquid within a second, according to an order-flow analysis that David Jeong, chief executive of the trading firm Tread.fi, published on X, and it hit weekend order books too thin to absorb it.

Coindaro pulled the minute-by-minute trade data for the trade.xyz contracts from Hyperliquid’s public API. It shows falls of 6% to 7% in under ten minutes, then a partial rebound, while the same venue’s Nasdaq-100 contract barely moved.

What the Hyperliquid data shows, minute by minute

Before 21:22 UTC the chip contracts on trade.xyz were nearly flat for the day. SanDisk (xyz:SNDK) closed the 21:21 minute at $1,292.30, in line with where it had traded since Friday evening. The next minute it printed $1,253.10, a 3% drop in sixty seconds, on about $3.1 million of trading, against about $17,000 the minute before. These figures come from 1-minute candles returned by Hyperliquid’s info API, read by Coindaro at 12:10 UTC on 18 October; volumes are approximate (contracts traded times the closing price of each minute).

The low came between 21:28 and 21:31 UTC depending on the contract. All of them bounced from about 21:32.

Source: Hyperliquid info API, 1-minute candles and asset contexts for the xyz blockchain, where users swap tokens directly from their own wallets without handing custody of their funds to a company.">dex, read 18 October 2026.

Two things stand out. The lows on Hyperliquid sit within a few dollars of the lows that PANews reported for the matching Binance perpetuals: Micron at $818.57, SanDisk at $1,215.35 and the SK Hynix ADR at $127.68 on Binance, against $816.79, $1,214.90 and $127.55 on trade.xyz. The two venues fell in step, which is what arbitrage between them would produce, although no source has shown who traded across both. And the broad Nasdaq-100 contract lost less than 1%, so this was a flush in memory and chip names, not a bet against US stocks as a whole.

By 12:11 UTC on Sunday, most of the drop had been recovered. Micron traded at $869.62, about 0.4% below its pre-crash level; SanDisk, at $1,274.90, was still about 1.3% lower.

From Binance to Hyperliquid in under a second

The sequence comes from Jeong’s review, as relayed by CoinDesk and by ChainCatcher. By his count, the first large SanDisk and Micron sell orders, from sellers he does not identify, hit Binance at 21:21:59 UTC: about $407,000 of SanDisk in the first second, then about $1.03 million more in the next, with Micron selling starting at the same time. Roughly ten addresses on Hyperliquid then sent immediate-or-cancel sell orders across six chip contracts (SNDK, SOXL, DRAM, SKHX, SKHY and MU) within 1.8 seconds, followed by a second synchronized round. Jeong says those orders opened new short positions instead of only closing longs.

Binance carried most of the early volume. In the first minute, according to CoinDesk, about $21.9 million of SanDisk changed hands there, against $3.1 million on trade.xyz. Coindaro’s pull of the Hyperliquid candles matches the trade.xyz side: about $3.14 million of SNDK and $0.31 million of MU in the 21:22 minute.

Then the liquidation engine took over. Coindaro’s candles show Micron volume on trade.xyz reaching about $10.8 million in the 21:28 minute and $9.5 million at 21:30, as the price slid from $846 to $817. Jeong, who cites the same two figures, puts them down to chain liquidations. ChainCatcher’s account of his analysis presents the forced closure of about $2 million of SanDisk longs, held by a trader nobody has identified, as the spark.

Who sent the first orders, and why, is not known. Whether the burst was one desk unwinding or a deliberate push is not established, and Coindaro found no statement from trade.xyz, Hyperliquid or Binance by 12:10 UTC on Sunday.

Chip stock perpetuals liquidations: $51.6 million, mostly longs

The per-contract split comes from CoinGlass figures published by CryptoBriefing. SOXL, the leveraged chip ETF, was the largest at about $12.73 million, ahead of SanDisk at about $10.85 million and SK Hynix (both tickers combined) at about $10.72 million. SOXS, the inverse of SOXL, saw about $9.07 million, and Micron about $4.40 million. Those five add up to about $47.8 million; the rest is spread over other contracts that no source itemises. CoinGlass does not split the total between Binance and Hyperliquid either.

Keep in mind what a liquidation figure measures. It is the notional size of the positions closed by the exchanges, not the cash traders lost. A trader with $1,000 of margin at 10x leverage holds a $10,000 position; if it is closed, the liquidation counts $10,000 while the loss is at most the $1,000 put up, unless cross-margin pulls in more of the account.

How stock perps are priced when Wall Street is closed

Perpetual futures have no expiry. A funding payment between longs and shorts keeps the contract near a reference price, and on trade.xyz that reference is an oracle price run by the market’s deployer. The trade.xyz documentation sets out how it behaves when its outside data stops.

For US stocks and ETFs such as SanDisk, Micron and SOXL, the relayer derives external prices 24 hours a day, five days a week, from Sunday 8:05 PM ET to Friday 8:00 PM ET, stitching together pre-market, regular, post-market and overnight sessions. The overnight session comes from Blue Ocean ATS. From Friday 8:00 PM ET to Sunday 8:05 PM ET, the market runs on internal pricing. On Saturday at 21:22 UTC, the contracts had been on internal pricing for more than 21 hours.

In that mode, the docs say the external price “remains fixed at the external close price”, meaning Friday evening’s level. The oracle then moves on its own, a little at a time, following an exponentially weighted average (30-minute time constant) of where buyers and sellers can actually fill a set amount on the order book. The mark price, used for margin and liquidations, is the median of three inputs: the oracle, the oracle plus a 150-second average of the gap between the book’s mid-price and the oracle, and the median of best bid, best ask and last trade. Relayer updates are clamped to 0.5% at a time.

There is also a brake. Discovery bounds hold the mark price within plus or minus one divided by the maximum leverage around a reference price. SanDisk, Micron and SOXL all allow 10x, so the band is 10% either side of the reference price. SanDisk and Micron have one permitted re-anchor per direction, after which the band becomes a hard cap until external pricing resumes. Saturday’s falls of about 6% to 7% in trade prices stayed inside that band, so the brake did not stop them.

The weekend gap is therefore structural. With no live share price, the order book is the price. On a Saturday evening that book is thin, and a few million dollars of market selling is enough to move it several percent, which in turn moves the mark price that decides who gets liquidated.

When the real prices come back

According to the trade.xyz docs, external pricing for US stocks resumes at Sunday 8:05 PM ET, which is 00:05 UTC on Monday 19 October (US daylight saving time runs until 1 November), through the Blue Ocean overnight session. The docs add that the oracle “reverts to the externally derived price on the next tick” once outside inputs resume. CoinDesk’s wording, that quotes return when US markets open Monday, refers to the regular Nasdaq session, which starts at 13:30 UTC.

SK Hynix’s Seoul-listed contract follows Korean hours instead: its internal weekend session runs from Friday 8:00 PM to Monday 9:01 AM Korea time, so it re-anchors at 00:01 UTC on Monday. Any gap between the weekend perp level and the first external quote can produce another round of liquidations, or a jump back up.

An earlier warning: SK Hynix in July

This is not the first weekend or off-hours shock on trade.xyz. On 28 July 2026, its SK Hynix contract’s mark price fell 18.7% after a thin pre-market print on Korea’s NXT venue fed the oracle, and somewhere between $57 million and $80 million of longs were liquidated across about 960 accounts, according to Galaxy Research. Trade.xyz reimbursed eligible losses as a one-off decision. The mechanism was different: in July a bad external price leaked in, while on Saturday there was no external price at all and the book set it.

The same Galaxy report put trade.xyz above 90% of open interest on HIP-3, Hyperliquid’s standard that lets outside teams deploy their own markets, and HIP-3 at around half of Hyperliquid’s perpetual volume, up from about 2% at the start of the year. Stock perps are spreading to more front ends: Pump.fun has just added Hyperliquid perps to its trading app, and Ripple Prime is pricing 24/7 swaps off Hyperliquid. On Binance, TradFi perpetuals reached about $433 billion of volume in August, The Block reported on 1 September.

What it means for retail traders in Europe

A stock perp is a leveraged derivative, not a share. The trade.xyz risk page states that its contracts give no ownership, voting or dividend rights in the underlying company. They are also not crypto-assets in the MiCA sense: the EU crypto rulebook excludes financial instruments, and derivatives on shares fall under MiFID II. A MiCA licence held by a crypto platform does not cover them.

Access rules differ by venue. Trade.xyz’s terms of use, last updated on 6 September 2026, bar people subject to the laws of the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as sanctioned territories. EU countries are not named, though the terms also exclude anyone for whom using the service would be unlawful or would need a licence the company does not hold.

Compare the protections an EU retail client gets on a regulated contract for difference. The product intervention measures adopted by ESMA in June 2018 capped leverage on single-share CFDs at 5:1 for retail clients, required providers to close positions when margin falls to 50% of the minimum, and imposed negative balance protection on each account. Those were temporary measures under Article 40 of MiFIR, renewed every three months. When they lapsed in the summer of 2019, most national regulators adopted permanent rules of their own, which ESMA required to be at least as strict; it reviewed and backed those of Consob in Italy and the AMF in France.

The leverage on these chip contracts is well above that line: 10x on trade.xyz, and up to 25x on Binance’s stock perps when the first ones were listed in July. That is two to five times the 5:1 cap that applies to single-share CFDs sold to retail clients by EU-authorised brokers. None of the trade.xyz documentation Coindaro read refers to those CFD rules.

In the United States, the SEC is still working through requests to bring tokenized stocks and perpetuals into a regulated setting, as our report on the Perpetuals filing in the SEC queue explains. Until a reference price comes back, a chip-stock perp on a weekend is priced by whoever is trading it. On Saturday that took a 6% to 7% fall in ten minutes.

What to watch next

• 00:01 UTC Monday 19 October: the SK Hynix (SKHX) contract re-anchors to the Korean market open.
• 00:05 UTC Monday: US-stock contracts on trade.xyz switch back to external prices through the overnight session.
• 13:30 UTC Monday: Nasdaq opens, giving the first regular-session prices for SanDisk, Micron and SOXL since Friday.
• Any statement or post-mortem from trade.xyz, Hyperliquid or Binance; none had been published by 12:10 UTC Sunday.