Chip-stock bets lost $52 million in 10 minutes with Wall Street shut
Nearly $52 million in leveraged bets tied to chip stocks and semiconductor funds were liquidated in 10 minutes Saturday, even as Wall Street was closed for the weekend.
The sell-off began on Binance and spread within seconds to Hyperliquid, with traders betting on higher prices accounting for about $38 million of the liquidations. Because the contracts trade around the clock, weekend prices were driven by crypto traders rather than actual share prices, which will provide a benchmark when U.S. markets reopen Monday.
Forced Liquidations
A sudden wave of selling wiped out nearly $52 million in crypto traders' leveraged bets on chip stocks in 10 minutes on Saturday. Those bets were placed through perpetual futures, contracts that track a stock's price and trade around the clock on crypto exchanges.
About $51.6 million in positions tied to chip stocks and semiconductor funds were force-closed between 21:22 and 21:32 UTC, according to CoinGlass data. SOXL, a fund that triples the daily moves in chip shares, took the biggest hit at about $12.7 million.
Market Mechanics
The selling started on Binance, where David Jeong, chief executive of trading firm Tread.fi, placed the first large SanDisk and Micron sell orders at 21:21:59 UTC. Less than a second later, orders hit Hyperliquid, and roughly 10 addresses opened bets against six chip-linked contracts within 1.8 seconds.
Binance handled about $21.9 million of SanDisk trading in that first minute, against $3.1 million on Trade XYZ.
Market Disconnect
Memory-chip shares were already coming off a rough week as investors weighed new competition from Chinese chipmaker CXMT. With the stock market shut, there was no real share price for these contracts to follow, so traders were reacting only to each other.
Trade XYZ's rules let trading on the platform set its own reference prices until outside stock quotes come back. Those quotes return when U.S. markets open Monday, which will show how far Saturday's prices strayed from where the shares actually trade.
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