Key points
- On Hyperliquid’s Trade XYZ markets, the SanDisk perp fell from $1,292.3 to $1,214.9 (−6.0%), Micron from $872.88 to $816.79 (−6.4%) and SOXL from $93.07 to $86.74 (−6.8%) between 21:22 and 21:32 UTC on Saturday, our read of one-minute exchange data shows.
- The levels that matter are Friday’s Nasdaq closes: MU $878.84, SNDK $1,299.30 and SOXL $93.67. By 09:45 UTC on Sunday the perps sat only 0.9–1.5% below them.
- If Monday’s open prints near those closes, Saturday was a weekend liquidity hole. If the shares open near Saturday’s lows, the perps were early rather than wrong.
Wall Street was closed. The chip trade still had a bad night.
Positions worth about $51.6 million in perpetuals tied to chip stocks and semiconductor ETFs were force-closed in those ten minutes, according to CoinGlass data cited by CoinDesk and TokenPost. Longs took about $38.1 million of that and shorts about $13.5 million. SOXL contracts led with about $12.7 million, followed by SanDisk at about $10.8 million and SK Hynix-linked contracts at about $10.7 million combined, TokenPost said.
Where it started
The first large sell prints came on Binance. A trade-by-trade review by Tread.fi chief executive David Jeong, reported by TechFlow and CoinDesk, found an aggressive SanDisk sell at 21:21:59 UTC worth about $407,000 in that second and about $1.03 million in the next, with Micron selling starting in the same second. Binance traded about $21.9 million of SanDisk perps in the 21:22 minute against about $3.1 million on Trade XYZ, the review found.
Our own pull of Hyperliquid’s one-minute data matches the Trade XYZ side: about $3.1 million of SNDK notional in the 21:22 minute, and Micron volume of about $0.3 million at 21:22 that only exploded later, to $10.85 million at 21:28 and $9.54 million at 21:30. Jeong reads that later surge as the liquidation cascade.
Put simply, a perpetual future is a contract with no expiry that tracks a price, and on a Saturday night the price it tracks isn’t trading. Trade XYZ’s oracle documentation says that when outside quotes are unavailable, its reference price starts from the last external price and then drifts with the venue’s own order book through a moving average. On Saturday night, that book had no floor to stand on.
The backdrop was already fragile. Friday’s cash session closed with MU down 5.6% and SNDK down 6.9% on the day, and SOXL had lost about 27% since Monday’s close, according to Yahoo Finance data. Friday’s US-close Market Read logged the chip slide dragging bitcoin to $80,705.
Derivatives
Leverage was the accelerant. After the drop, open interest on Hyperliquid’s xyz:MU contract stood at about $163 million, xyz:SNDK at about $130 million and xyz:SOXL at about $35 million, based on the exchange’s contract counts and mark prices at 09:45 UTC. Those books are a fraction of the cash market’s depth, which is why about $1.4 million of selling in two seconds could start the slide.
Bitcoin felt it too, though less. Kraken’s bitcoin price slipped from about $81,525 at 21:20 UTC to $80,655.2 by 21:40, about 1.1%, which is still the low of the past 24 hours. It traded near $82,100 by Sunday morning.
This is the product Seoul warned about two days earlier. Korea’s Financial Services Commission said offshore perps tied to Korean stocks commonly carry 10× to 200× leverage, and that at 150× a move of about 0.66% can wipe out a position (Korea’s warning on offshore stock perps).
The levels
The level to watch is Friday’s close in each name. A Monday open near MU $878.84 and SNDK $1,299.30 would mark Saturday’s $816.79 and $1,214.90 lows as weekend air pockets. A cash open at or below those lows would turn the weekend perps into the first venue to price a fresh leg of the chip selloff, and would put SOXL’s $86.74 Saturday low back in view.
The alternative read is less mechanical. Jeong’s review noted that the roughly ten Hyperliquid addresses that sold within 1.8 seconds used immediate-or-cancel orders that opened new shorts rather than closing positions. The review did not say who placed them, and nothing public links those addresses to the Binance seller. Either way, the shares themselves will vote at 13:30 UTC on Monday.
Weekend books are thin by design. Stay nimble.
As of 09:45 UTC, the Trade XYZ Micron perp was near $870.6 and BTC was trading near $82,100.
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This article is for information only and is not investment advice.