About $52 million of chip-stock perpetual bets liquidated in 10 minutes while Wall Street was shut

About $US51.6 million of leveraged positions in perpetual futures tied to chip stocks and semiconductor funds were force-closed in 10 minutes on Saturday, between 21:22 and 21:32 UTC (8:22am to 9:32pm GMT on Saturday), CoinDesk reported, citing data from CoinGlass. US stock markets were closed at the time.

Perpetual futures are contracts that track an asset’s price and trade around the clock on crypto exchanges. A leveraged position is closed automatically when losses use up the trader’s deposit.

About $38 million of the liquidated positions were bets on higher prices, the data showed. Contracts on SOXL, a fund designed to return three times the daily move of a chip-stock index, accounted for about $12.7 million. SanDisk and SK Hynix contracts accounted for about $10.8 million each.

The selling began on Binance, where the first large SanDisk and Micron sell orders were placed at 21:21:59 UTC, according to a review of the trades by the chief executive of trading firm Tread.fi, CoinDesk reported. Less than a second later, orders hit stock-tracking contracts listed by Trade XYZ on the Hyperliquid exchange. Binance handled about $21.9 million of SanDisk trading in the first minute, compared with $3.1 million on Trade XYZ.

With the stock market closed, the contracts had no live share price to follow. Trade XYZ’s rules let trading on the platform set its own reference prices until outside stock quotes return, CoinDesk reported. Regular trading on US stock exchanges resumes at 9:30am New York time on Monday (1:30pm GMT on Monday).