Silver sank as much as 17% over the past 24 hours, wiping out a two-day rebound as the metal struggled to find a floor after last week’s historic rout.
The move also dragged down gold and copper, extending a unwind that traders say has been magnified by thin liquidity and heavy speculative positioning.
The renewed decline is also showing on crypto rails. On Hyperliquid, one of the bigger liquidation pressures tied to tokenized silver was a forced close of about $17.75 million in XYZ:SILVER, of which about $16.82 million came from long positions, according to trading data shared by market participants.
The lopsided relaxation fits the recent pattern of traders leaning on rebound bets only to be washed out when volatility picks up again.
That spillover is exactly what hedge fund manager Michael Burry flagged earlier this week.
Burry described a “collateral death spiral” dynamic where leverage builds as metals rise, then falling crypto-security forces traders to sell tokenized metals to make the margin. He highlighted that bitcoin losses could force institutions to liquidate profitable metal positions.
In that kind of bond, the liquidation rankings can look reversed, with metal products briefly doing more damage than bitcoin itself.
Macro headers don’t help. Markets are still digesting the political implications of Kevin Warsh’s nomination to chair the Federal Reserve, while President Donald Trump has pushed back on the idea that the Fed could become more hawkish.
Price expectations do matter for precious metals, but the biggest driver right now is positioning and forced selling, not the pure macro bid that drove last month’s rise.
