10/10, One Year On: The Day Crypto Lost $19 Billion in 24 Hours

At about 15:00 UTC on 10 October 2026, a trader who calls himself the White Whale posted on X that he was in "a state of melancholy today". He made clear it was not about the money. "We lost real lives on 10/10," he wrote. "I'm personally aware of at least three, although there may be more." A year earlier, on the same date, he had lost $62 million in a few minutes. He was one of 1.6 million people whose bets were wiped out on the worst day crypto markets have ever had.

The numbers from that Friday, 10 October 2025, still have no rival. In 24 hours $19.16 billion of borrowed bets on crypto prices were forcibly closed, according to the data firm CoinGlass, which counted 1.63 million trader accounts hit. The previous record, around $10 billion in April 2021, was barely half of it. The COVID crash of March 2020, the collapse of Terra's LUNA in May 2022 and the fall of FTX in November 2022 each cost leveraged traders roughly $1 billion to $1.6 billion in a day. Bitcoin fell from about $122,000 to about $104,000 within hours. Hundreds of smaller coins fell 60% to 90% in minutes. One year on, the market has not recovered. Bitcoin opened this morning near $83,000, about 32% below where it opened that day.

What leverage is, and why it bit

©CMZ chart. Data: CoinGlass, via KuCoin and CoinGecko

Most of the money lost on 10/10 was not lost by people who simply owned coins. It was lost on leverage: trading with borrowed money. A trader puts up $1,000 as a deposit, called margin, and the exchange lets them bet as if they had $10,000 or $50,000. A long is a bet that the price will rise; a short is a bet that it will fall. Crypto exchanges such as Binance, Bybit and Hyperliquid offer these bets on "perpetual futures", contracts that track a coin's price and never expire.

The catch is the liquidation. When the price moves against a leveraged trader far enough to eat the deposit, the exchange sells the position automatically, at whatever price it can get. It is a stockbroker's margin call with no phone call: no warning, no chance to top up, just a machine closing the trade. And every forced sale pushes the price lower, which triggers the next tier of forced sales. On 10 October 2025 the market was carrying record borrowing, after Bitcoin had set an all-time high of $126,080 on 6 October, and almost everyone was leaning the same way. CoinGlass data showed the large majority of the money liquidated that day came from longs.

Crypto also never closes. There are no circuit breakers, the automatic trading halts that pause the New York Stock Exchange when prices fall too fast. When bad news arrives on a Friday evening, crypto is the only big market still open to absorb it.

Friday, hour by hour

©CMZ chart. Data: Binance

At 09:00 UTC on 10 October, Bitcoin traded at about $121,600 on Binance, the world's biggest crypto exchange. Nothing much moved until just before 15:00 UTC, 10:57 in the morning in New York, when President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social network that China had taken "an extraordinarily aggressive position on Trade". Beijing had announced new export controls on rare earth minerals, and Trump said he saw no reason to meet President Xi Jinping and threatened a "massive increase" in tariffs. Stocks slid. Bitcoin fell below $120,000 within the hour and kept slipping through the afternoon, to about $116,700 by 20:00 UTC.

By the time Wall Street closed at 16:00 in New York, 20:00 UTC, the S&P 500 had lost 2.7%, its worst day since April, and the Nasdaq 3.6%. Then, late in the afternoon in Washington, shortly before 21:00 UTC, Trump posted again: an additional 100% tariff on Chinese imports from 1 November, plus export controls on "any and all critical software". Bitcoin dropped about $3,000 almost as the post went live.

What followed was the cascade. According to the research firm Amberdata, it turned violent at 20:50 UTC, and over the next 40 minutes $6.93 billion of positions were liquidated, about 70% of the day's total. CoinGecko's account of the night puts $3.21 billion of that inside a single minute, around 21:15 UTC. Bitcoin hit $102,000 on Binance during the 21:00 UTC hour and about $104,000 on most other venues. Ether fell from about $4,370 to $3,435 on Binance, more than a fifth. Solana fell from $221 to $169.

The smaller coins simply fell through the floor. Binance's own trading records show Sui down 84% at the low, Avalanche 70%, Cardano 66%, Chainlink 64% and Dogecoin 62%. Cosmos's ATOM, which opened the day at $4.06, traded at $0.001. IoTeX's IOTX printed at one millionth of a dollar. The order books had nobody left on the buy side. Market makers, the trading firms paid to keep buy and sell orders on the screen at all times, pulled their orders as their own systems and connections strained, and with the buyers gone a single forced sale could knock a price down 90% before bouncing back.

Hyperliquid, a crypto exchange run on its own blockchain, reported $10.31 billion of liquidations, more than any other venue, ahead of Bybit at $4.65 billion and Binance at $2.41 billion. Hyperliquid's co-founder Jeff Yan pointed out that Binance reports at most one liquidation per second, so its true figure was likely higher.

Binance's broken prices

The worst of it was concentrated on Binance. Like a broker that accepts shares as security for a loan, Binance let customers post certain tokens as collateral for their bets. Three of them were USDe, a dollar token issued by Ethena Labs, and wBETH and BNSOL, Binance's own receipt tokens for staked ether and solana. Binance valued that collateral using prices from its own order book.

Between about 21:36 and 22:16 UTC, USDe fell to $0.65 on Binance while it stayed close to $1 almost everywhere else. wBETH, worth about $4,700 that morning, printed at $430. BNSOL fell from $237 to $35. Anyone whose bets were backed by those tokens saw their collateral marked down by a third or more in seconds, and the machine liquidated them.

Binance said the crash was driven by the macro shock and that about 75% of the day's liquidations happened before its internal prices broke. It nonetheless paid about $283 million within days to users liquidated while holding the three tokens, and on 14 October launched a $400 million "Together Initiative": $300 million in vouchers of $4 to $6,000 for users who had lost at least 30% of their account, and a $100 million low-interest loan fund for trading firms. Binance had announced on 6 October that it would change how it priced wBETH and BNSOL, with the new method due on 14 October. The crash landed four days inside that gap.

Critics did not accept Binance's version. Star Xu, founder of the rival exchange OKX, blamed a Binance promotion offering up to 12% annual yield on USDe deposits, which he argued had encouraged traders to pile borrowed money onto a token Binance then priced badly, and said the day caused "real and lasting damage to the industry". Changpeng Zhao, Binance's co-founder, called the idea that Binance caused the crash "far-fetched". The full row is told in The Binance Glitch: Who Really Killed the Bull Market on 10/10?

Why it cascaded

A tariff threat on its own does not wipe out $19 billion in a day. The best established cause is leverage. Going into 10 October, open interest, the total value of outstanding bets on crypto futures, stood at a record of about $217 billion, according to CoinGecko. Max Xu, a derivatives executive at Bybit, put it at about $220 billion in comments reported by Decrypt. Funding rates, the fee that buyers of perpetual futures pay sellers when buyers dominate, had climbed for ether bets from about 10% a year to nearly 30% by 6 October, according to the advisory firm FTI Consulting. The market was a crowded trade waiting for a push.

The push came at the worst hour. Binance's own price data show Bitcoin peaking at $122,550 at about 13:40 UTC and already easing before Trump's first post at 14:57. The 100% tariff post landed after Wall Street had shut for the weekend. "The sell-off began immediately after US markets closed late on Friday, at a moment when both European and Asian trading desks were asleep," the commentator Ran Neuner said, as reported by NewsBTC. Evgeny Gaevoy of Wintermute called it "a flash crash on mega leveraged market on illiquid Friday night", CoinDesk reported. FTI Consulting found that the orders sitting at the best prices for Bitcoin shrank by more than 90% on key venues that day.

Then came Binance's pricing gap, described above: collateral valued from its own order book, with the switch to outside prices still four days away. Order book data obtained by Cointelegraph showed buying interest for USDe on Binance falling to about $2 million by 21:54 UTC. By the same analysis, liquidations linked to USDe came to about $346 million, wBETH $169 million and BNSOL $77 million.

The market makers left. The analytics firm Coinwatch, cited by the asset manager CoinShares, said the big liquidity providers "withdrew liquidity entirely". Firms quoting prices on smaller coins found themselves holding falling tokens "with no immediate hedging available", insights4vc wrote. Traders reported Binance's app and connections freezing; Binance said "some platform modules" failed briefly after 21:18 UTC but that its core trading engines and API trading, the direct link used by professional firms, kept working. It said ATOM's $0.001 and similar prints came from old limit orders, some dating to 2019, that filled when the buyers vanished.

Auto-deleveraging finished the job. By closing winning positions on Hyperliquid, Binance and elsewhere, it stripped hedges from traders who thought they were protected, and, insights4vc noted, removed buyers that might have helped prices rebound.

The last explanation is an allegation. Colin Wu, founder of the news service Wu Blockchain, argued on 12 October 2025 that the crash may have been a deliberate attack on Binance's Unified Account margin system, timed for the gap between the 6 October announcement and the 14 October change. He estimated the damage at $500 million to $1 billion. A widely shared thread by an X user called ElonTrades, reported by Bitcoinist and NewsBTC, claimed that someone dumped roughly $60 million to $90 million of USDe, wBETH and BNSOL on Binance to break its internal prices, setting off $500 million to $1 billion of liquidations there, and linked it to the Hyperliquid short described below. Cointelegraph's order book analysis called the evidence of a coordinated attack "inconclusive". The trader Alex Krüger said the USDe selling "could have simply been a rational actor looking to derisk". No regulator or court has found that anyone manipulated the market. Binance's statement of 13 October did not mention manipulation, and the exchange maintains that about 75% of liquidations happened before its prices broke.

On the evidence so far, the tariff post was the spark, record leverage was the fuel, and Binance's pricing, with market makers gone, turned a sharp sell-off into the biggest cascade crypto has seen.

The short, and the winners closed out

Not everyone lost. About 30 minutes before the 100% tariff post, an account on Hyperliquid opened short bets on Bitcoin and ether worth about $1.1 billion, using about $160 million of its own money, and closed them with a profit reported at $150 million to $200 million. On 12 October a pseudonymous on-chain sleuth called Eye linked the wallet to Garrett Jin, a former chief executive of the defunct exchange BitForex, and Zhao reposted the claim. Jin denied it. "I have no connection with the Trump family or Donald Trump Jr. This isn't insider trading," he wrote, adding that the funds were his clients', not his. The blockchain investigator ZachXBT said the only direct link was a single transfer of 40,000 USDT. No regulator has accused anyone of trading on advance knowledge of the post.

Hyperliquid had its own shock. When liquidations were too large for its insurance pool to absorb, it used auto-deleveraging, or ADL, for the first time across its main margin system in more than two years. ADL closes winning trades on the other side to cover losing ones, as if a broker whose client could not pay simply cancelled another client's profitable position to balance the books. About $2.1 billion of positions were closed this way in roughly 12 minutes, by one analysis. Traders who had hedged correctly found their protection removed in the middle of the crash. Yan said the exchange kept "100% uptime with zero bad debt".

The White Whale and the people underneath

The White Whale was a celebrity on Hyperliquid, an anonymous trader whose huge public positions others watched for signals. In August 2025, according to the Chinese crypto outlet PANews, he held about $410 million of long bets on ether and solana. On 10 October his unrealised profit sat at about $98 million, close to a personal target of $100 million. At 22:04 UTC that night he posted: "Losing a good portion of this year's gains is personally devastating." He had never been liquidated before, he wrote, but had never traded through ether "flash crashing over $1,000 in a short amount of time". The next afternoon, in a long post titled "A Post-Crash Pilot Debrief", he put the loss at "$62M, gone in a flash". He said his attempts to move stablecoins to safety hung on the Arbitrum and Base networks, and "nothing could outrun that $3200 ETH / $138 SOL wick" on Hyperliquid. "Leverage isn't the villain," he wrote. Five strangers offered to send him money to rebuild. He refused. On 15 October he blamed Binance: market makers could not connect to it, he argued, so they pulled liquidity everywhere, and he called its compensation "a marketing play".

Most of the 1.6 million were not whales. For a trader known to CMZ, who asked not to be named, it was around 2am. He held long bets on ether and solana on Binance with very little leverage, in what he thought of as the safe coins, and in seconds he lost 28,000 USDT, about $28,000. Binance later paid him 4,000 USDC under its compensation scheme, about a seventh of the loss. "It was not enough," he said. "It was brutal." In the year that followed, his finances, his marriage and his children all suffered.

On Hyperliquid, where every account can be seen on the blockchain, the damage was public. More than 1,000 wallets were emptied completely that night and about 6,300 ended in loss, according to the exchange's own leaderboard data as reported by CoinDesk on 11 October 2025; 205 of them lost more than $1 million each. The blockchain tracker Lookonchain picked out two that had lost more than $15 million each and were left with $140 and $104. Behind each address is a person or a fund, and the blockchain does not say which.

On ordinary exchanges the losers were harder to see. A Binance customer posting on X as @FilmesHGames, who said they had traded there since 2017, wrote to Changpeng Zhao that during the crash they could not buy or sell anything and had to close their own bets at a loss to avoid losing everything. They received none of the Together Initiative vouchers, they said, and felt "embarrassed and humiliated". Another user, who said they had lost $30,000, wrote that five days of messages to Binance support had produced no reason why they did not qualify. Both posts were reported by the news site CCN on 20 October 2025.

Being careful did not guarantee safety. One account, which published its records on X under the name 812.eth, ran an automated trading system that had worked without a break for 1,137 days. As prices fell, according to logs reviewed by Forbes, the system did what it was built to do and tried to shrink its bets on Dogecoin and XRP with "reduce-only" orders, instructions that can only make a position smaller and that Binance says get priority when its systems are busy. Over 106 minutes it sent more than 200 of them. Binance rejected every one ("Server is busy, please try again later"). By the time the liquidation engine had finished, Forbes reported, an account that held about $4 million that morning had 22 cents left.

Professionals were not spared either. Zhen Guo, chief executive of ZeroDivision, a trading team managing about $300 million in market-neutral strategies, meaning bets built to earn whichever way prices move, told Wu Blockchain that his firm lost 20% to 30% that night. "The situation that day exceeded what our risk control system could handle," he said. Cautious market makers lost 10% to 20%, by his account, aggressive ones 40% to 50%, and some went bust. Evgeny Gaevoy, chief executive of the market maker Wintermute, told The Block's podcast that Binance had auto-deleveraged his firm on one token at $5 while it traded at about $1.

Some kept betting. Jeffrey Huang, a Taiwanese former pop singer turned crypto investor known as Machi Big Brother, lost about $14 million on Hyperliquid in the crash and posted on X: "Was fun while it lasted." He did not stop. By the end of June 2026 his losses on Hyperliquid since September 2025 had passed $80 million, according to on-chain data reported by Cryptopolitan, and he was selling his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, digital collectible pictures, at a loss to raise money for margin: 34 of them in a month, for about $514,000.

For some, the cost went far beyond money. Konstantin Galich, a 32-year-old Ukrainian crypto trader and educator known online as Kostya Kudo, was found dead in Kyiv on 11 October 2025. Police treated it as a likely suicide, and local media reported that he had told his family of financial troubles and depression the day before. No official finding has tied his death to the crash. The White Whale has said he knows of at least three deaths and has not named anyone. In the early hours of 11 October he had posted: "Millions of people lost a lot today. Many lost it all." In his anniversary post he wrote: "Nothing is more valuable than a human life." Anyone struggling can find free, confidential support at findahelpline.com.

One year later

©CMZ chart. Data: Binance, CoinGecko

The tariff threat that sparked the selling never arrived. On 12 October 2025 Trump posted: "Don't worry about China, it will all be fine!", and Bitcoin bounced to about $115,000. Trump and Xi met in Busan, South Korea, on 30 October and agreed a truce, and the extra 100% duty was never imposed. Bitcoin never got its high back. It peaked at about $116,400 on 27 October, ended 2025 down for the year, fell to about $69,000 by February 2026 and hit $57,800 on 1 July 2026, its lowest since the crash. This week it closed at about $82,100, according to The Rio Times. At about $83,000 today it is roughly 32% below its price on the morning of 10 October 2025 and 34% below the record.

The market that came back is thinner. Through early 2026 CoinDesk reported order books that had not been rebuilt, wider gaps between buying and selling prices and market makers slow to return. Ethena's USDe shrank from about $14.7 billion on 9 October 2025 to about $6.3 billion two months later. Leverage did return: in August 2026 nearly $3 billion of bets were liquidated in a single day, this time mostly shorts. A year on, no regulator has published findings on 10/10 and no court has ruled on who, if anyone, was to blame.