On Saturday evening, almost $52 million in leveraged bets on chipmaker stocks was force-closed within ten minutes. It all happened on crypto exchanges while the US stock market sat closed. The episode shows how round-the-clock stock trading works and where it is weakest.
What exactly happened on Saturday evening?
According to CoinGlass, exchanges force-closed $51.6 million in positions between 21:22 and 21:32 UTC. These were contracts tied to semiconductor stocks and funds. About $38 million came from traders betting on higher prices.
A review of the trades by David Jeong, CEO of the trading firm Tread.fi, shows the first large sell orders for SanDisk and Micron appeared on Binance at 21:21:59 (he placed them himself). Less than a second later the orders reached Hyperliquid, where Trade XYZ lists stock contracts. Roughly 10 addresses opened bets against six chip-linked contracts within 1.8 seconds.
How do stock contracts work when the exchange is closed?
These are perpetual futures. Such a contract follows an asset's price and has no expiry date, so it can be traded at any hour, even late on a Saturday. The trader never buys the share itself, only a bet on its price.
- Leverage: a trader posts a small deposit and opens a position several times larger.
- If the price moves against them and the loss eats the deposit, the exchange closes the position automatically. That is called a liquidation.
- Forced selling pushes the price down by itself, so the next position in line can be wiped out the same way.
- With many such positions, a chain forms that sweeps away tens of millions in minutes.
That is how Saturday played out: the first sales knocked out some positions, and their forced selling dragged prices further.
Who took the biggest hit
SOXL triples the daily moves of chipmaker shares. Bets on it carry double the risk, because exchange leverage stacks on top of the leverage inside the fund itself. Memory stocks were already having a rough week, with investors worried about competition from China's CXMT.
Binance led trading volume in the first minute, with about $21.9 million in SanDisk against $3.1 million on Trade XYZ.
Why was there nothing to check the price against?
On weekdays these contracts follow quotes of the real shares, and arbitrageurs quickly pull the price back to reality. On Saturday there are no quotes. Under Trade XYZ rules, the platform sets its own reference prices until outside data returns.
This is a feature of the whole tokenized-stock market. Blockworks data cited by Cointelegraph shows more than 70% of tokenized stock volume on BNB Chain happens when Wall Street is closed. On Solana the share is 63%, on Base about 60%. And the value of tokenized stocks, per RWA.xyz, has climbed to nearly $3.3 billion.
Demand for night trading is obvious. Exchanges just have nothing to verify their prices against at that hour.
What Monday will show
When Wall Street opens, outside quotes return and it will become clear how far Saturday's prices strayed from the real ones. It is the first practical test of whether a weekend crypto price works as a benchmark.
For anyone holding such contracts with leverage, the takeaway is concrete: weekends run on different rules, and there is no safety net of an open exchange.
Comments
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *