A weekend selloff in a Nasdaq 100-linked perpetual futures market on EdgeX triggered about $13 million in liquidations, highlighting the risk of trading stock index perps when the underlying traditional markets are closed.
On Saturday, a newly created wallet began executing a six-hour time-weighted average price (TWAP) order to short 398 XYZ100 contracts worth about $10 million, according to onchain data from Hypurrscan.
The selling pressure pushed the price of the XYZ100 down more than 3.5% within minutes, triggering a cascade of liquidations.
Liquidations refer to the automatic closing of a leveraged position by a broker or exchange and occur when a trader’s losses have depleted their collateral to a point where it is no longer sufficient to maintain the position.
Blockchain data shows that one trader alone lost approximately $7.4 million in long positions, while another was liquidated for $2.7 million, bringing total market liquidations to around $13 million.
Several traders at X questioned whether the market was vulnerable to after-hours manipulation, noting that the XYZ100 fell nearly 4% over the weekend despite no corresponding macro or equity news. Others argued that such moves are an inherent risk of trading equity-linked crypto-perps outside regular market hours.
“This weekend you no longer trade the Nasdaq,” one trader wrote. “You trade with whoever has the most capital on a thin order book.”
EdgeX has quickly grown into one of the largest venues for perpetual futures trading. According to DefiLlama data, the platform processed about $167 billion in perp trading volume last month, often rivaling major competitors such as Aster and Hyperliquid in daily volume.
This particular liquidation cascade demonstrates increasing demand for tokenized equity products, but also the risks of trading products that reflect the price of a closed market.
