The digital asset market faced its largest liquidation cascade yet on October 10, which is now referred to as crypto’s Black Friday. Within 24 hours, over $19 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out, marking the largest single deleveraging event in the industry’s history.
The sell-off began late in the US session after President Trump announced a proposed 100% tariff on Chinese imports, sparking global risk aversion across stocks, commodities and crypto. The steepest declines occurred within a 25-minute window as high leverage collided with thin liquidity. According to CoinDesk Reference Rates (CADLI), bitcoin fell to $106,560, ether to $3,551 and solana to $174, with smaller-cap tokens down more than 75% on the day.
Market dynamics and the extent of deleveraging
According to CoinDesk Data, the total perpetual open interest on futures fell 43%, falling from $217 billion on October 10 to $123 billion on October 11. The biggest single-day contraction occurred on Hyperliquid, where open interest fell 57%, from $14 billion to $6 billion, as positions were liquidated heavily.
Source: CoinDesk Data
Data suggests that about $16 billion of the $19 billion total came from long liquidations, where almost all traders had 2x leverage or higher with no stop-losses on altcoins that were wiped out within minutes.
Public blockchains such as Hyperliquid provided a rare, transparent look into the sequence of forced liquidations, where the liquidation queue and execution can be verified on-chain. In contrast, centralized exchange data aggregates and batch liquidation data, meaning that the true scale of forced settlements may have even exceeded the widely reported $20 billion, as aggregated reporting often underestimates theoretical values.
Source: CoinDesk Data
Structural stress & order book collapse
The episode underscored how tightly coupled liquidity, collateral and oracle systems have become. What began as a macro-driven relaxation quickly developed into a market-wide stress event. As prices breached key liquidation levels, market depth collapsed by more than 80% across major exchanges within minutes.
In some cases, thin order books temporarily printed large capital assets such as ATOM, which printed near-zero bids; a reflection not of fair market value but of market makers withdrawing liquidity as risk systems throttled activity. With collateral shared across assets and venues based on local price feeds, feedback loops amplified volatility across the ecosystem. Even well-capitalized platforms proved vulnerable as liquidity evaporated across the board.
Fair-value pricing in volatility
When exchange-level prices become erratic, CoinDesk reference rates such as CCIX and CADLI act as stabilizing mechanisms. These multi-venue benchmarks aggregate prices from hundreds of sources, apply quality filters and outlier rejection to produce a global, consensus-based fair value.
During Black Friday’s volatility, benchmark rates revealed that market-wide valuations remained far less extreme than some venue-specific prints suggested. This transparency allows market participants to distinguish between true repricing and localized dislocation, providing a neutral reference for assessing post-trade performance.
Benchmarks don’t stop volatility, but they define it – and ensure that traders, funds and exchanges have reliable data when the market breaks.
Final thoughts
The severe dislocation in the market showed how leverage, liquidity and fragmented infrastructure can converge into a feedback loop that overwhelms even the largest trading venues. It also exposed the limits of transparency in a system where some on-chain exchanges, such as Hyperliquid, reveal liquidation flows in real time, while centralized venues still act as partial black boxes.
Crypto’s maturity will be defined by how it internalizes these shocks. Better risk control, consistent security standards and real-time transparency will be as important as using benchmarks for pricing. CoinDesk Reference prices help confirm fair valuations when screens turn red, but true resilience depends on exchange architecture, deeper order books, more robust oracle design and, ultimately, exchange uptime.
The industry now faces a choice between treating this as a one-off event or as the plan to build a market that can absorb what’s next.
