$52 million gone in 10 minutes: weekend bets on chip stocks unravel on crypto exchanges while Wall Street is shut

Crypto exchanges let traders bet on chip stocks at 2pm on a Saturday, and this Saturday that cost them. About $51.6 million of leveraged positions tied to chip stocks and semiconductor funds were liquidated between 21:22 and 21:32 UTC, or 2:22 to 2:32pm Pacific, CoinDesk reported, citing CoinGlass data. About $38 million came from long positions. Contracts tracking SOXL, a fund that triples the daily moves of chip shares, took the largest hit at about $12.7 million, followed by SanDisk and SK Hynix at about $10.8 million each.

According to a review by David Jeong, chief executive of Tread.fi, cited by CoinDesk, the first large SanDisk and Micron sell orders landed on Binance at 21:21:59 UTC. Selling reached Hyperliquid less than a second later, and on Trade XYZ, which lists stock-tracking contracts there, about ten addresses opened short bets on six chip-linked contracts within 1.8 seconds. In the first minute Binance handled about $21.9 million of SanDisk trading against $3.1 million on Trade XYZ, CoinDesk and TokenPost reported.

The contracts are perpetual futures that trade around the clock. With US markets shut, Trade XYZ's rules let it set its own reference prices until outside quotes return at Monday's open. Memory-chip shares were already under pressure this week over competition from Chinese chipmaker CXMT, CoinDesk said. Bitcoin itself was calm: about $81,450 at 6:55am Pacific on Sunday, roughly flat on the day, per CoinGecko.