Traders speculating on SanDisk experienced higher forced liquidations over the preceding 24 hours than those wagering on XRP, illustrating how extensively leverage on cryptocurrency platforms now extends into semiconductor equities.
Roughly $803 million in leveraged accounts were wiped out across 10 different platforms, data from CoinGlass indicates. A liquidation occurs when a trading venue automatically shuts down a user’s borrowed trade because their accumulated losses have exhausted the initial margin. Long contracts, representing bets on rising valuations, comprised $694 million of that figure—amounting to 86%—and impacted 172,113 individual traders.
The bulk of the carnage materialized rapidly. Approximately $595 million, representing nearly 75% of the daily aggregate, was liquidated within the final 12 hours as South Korea’s KOSPI index dropped over 6% and bitcoin retreated below the $81,000 threshold. The single largest destruction was a $9.65 million bitcoin long position on Binance, which was forcibly closed near $81,773. Binance represented 50% of the entire liquidation volume.
Bitcoin topped the list with $181 million in liquidations, followed closely by ether at $178 million despite possessing a considerably smaller market capitalization. SOL wagers shed $60 million, ZEC lost $24 million, and NEAR accounted for $22 million.
Equity-backed derivatives appeared next on the ledger. Perpetual futures tied to U.S. memory-chip manufacturer SanDisk registered $19.09 million in liquidations, narrowly exceeding the $19.04 million seen in HYPE and the $18.78 million recorded by XRP. These perpetual products allow market participants to speculate on equity prices 24 hours a day on decentralized and centralized crypto platforms without any expiration date. Instruments referencing SK Hynix and Micron, alongside SOXL—a triple-leveraged U.S. semiconductor exchange-traded fund—also populated the heatmap, with SOXL alone suffering $7.21 million in liquidations.
These financial casualties mirrored the broader sell-off occurring in Seoul. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix both declined roughly 8% amid concerns surrounding artificial intelligence valuations and rivalries involving Chinese memory-chip producers, as covered by CoinDesk.
Crude oil behaved in the opposite manner. Futures tracking WTI and Brent petroleum stood out as some of the sole contracts on the visualization where bearish short positions comprised the majority of liquidations, with Brent maintaining levels near $106 following a three-session advance.
Market direction has since flipped. Out of the $74 million liquidated over the previous four hours, $59 million, or 79%, originated from short sellers as bitcoin bounced back above $83,000.
With bullish bets accounting for 86% of the daily destruction and pessimistic traders currently absorbing the losses, bitcoin approaches Thursday’s American consumer inflation release with a significant portion of its long leverage fully purged.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/10/13/tokenized-sandisk-bets-saw-more-liquidations-than-xrp-as-asia-s-chip-rout-wipes-out-usd800-million.
