19.5 billion dollars were settled in 1 day.
It was the worst crash in crypto history, surpassing episodes like FTX, Luna and COVID 10 times.
On October 10, 2025, the crypto market lived the biggest collapse in its history. In a matter of hours, bitcoin plummeted from $122,000 to $103,300, dragging the entire ecosystem into a fall that was as violent as it was coordinated.
Settlements in derivatives reached $19.5 billion in a single day, an absolute record that left behind emblematic episodes such as the fall of FTX, the collapse of LUNA or the COVID crash of 2020.
But, unlike those cases, this time there was no protocol failure or a massive hack. What happened was an internal implosion: a machinery saturated with leverage, without liquidity or technical buffers, which transformed a moderate political shock into a perfect avalanche.
The chronology of the event was surgical.
- At 9:50 a.m. ET, the market was already showing aggressive selling even before any political announcement.
- At 10:57, Donald Trump published on X his intention to impose a 100% tariff on Chinese imports.
- At 4:30 in the afternoon, a institutional whale opened massive short positions on crypto assets. Twenty minutes later, Trump officially confirmed the measure.
- By 5:20 pm, the system had already liquidated more than 19 billion dollars and the operator behind that play had nearly 192 million in profits.
- Everything happened in 7 hours.
The heart of the collapse was in leverage. $16.7 billion in long positions were liquidated compared to just $2.5 billion in short positions, a ratio of almost 7 to 1. Almost all exchanges—with the exception of Bitfinex—reported more than 90% liquidations in long positions. Only on Hyperliquid, the same platform where the “whale” opened its shorts, 10.3 billion were deleted in a matter of minutes.
This disproportion was not a coincidence: the market had come from months of accumulated optimism and greed, confident that the price of bitcoin would continue to rise with institutional momentum. Traders were overleveraged and poorly hedged. A political spark was enough for the financial house of cards to collapse.
Leverage acted as a disaster multiplier. Each price drop It activated automatic liquidations that forced new sales, pushing the price even lower and generating an unstoppable cascade. There was no rational speculation or sustained fear: fue pure market mechanics. The system, designed to amplify gains in bullish phases, transformed into an automatic destruction machine when the price moved in the opposite direction. What should have been a normal correction became a purge of historic proportions. The supposed institutional maturity of the ecosystem was evident: it continues to be an environment dominated by excessive instruments and without real brakes.
The timing didn’t help either. The sell-off began minutes after the US markets closed, on a Friday afternoon, with Asia and Europe after hours and liquidity virtually absent. The price oracles of several DeFi protocols failed at the same time, causing automatic liquidations based on erroneous data. The liquidity provision algorithms stopped functioning normally, creating price gaps that prevented any cushioning. Several exchanges suffered outages that blocked operations in a panic, and some on-chain portals were hacked during those critical hours. Binance recognized “platform-related issues,” promised compensation to affected users and announced new protection measures, including redundant oracles and automatic crash limits.
The result was a perfect storm: an initial dump of about $90 million on Binance, combined with a $1.1 billion leveraged short position on another platform, set off a global chain of liquidations that wiped out almost $20 billion in market value. It was not a stablecoin failure or external manipulation: it was a demonstration of how the financial sophistication of the ecosystem can turn against it when the structure is stressed to the maximum.
The emotional context amplified the blow. Since April, after the tariff war and Liberation Day, the market has been experiencing a sustained rally with a feeling of invulnerability. The greed index remained above 60 points and the dominant narrative speaks of a new “institutional era” for bitcoin.
In this climate of complacency, the tariff announcement It was the psychological and technical trigger that was missing. Fear spread faster than sell orders, and algorithms did the rest. Paradoxically, at the time of writing this column, there has been a rebound in the price of bitcoin up to USD 115,000, showing that the damage was not fundamental. The network continues and will continue validating blocks and the protocol did not fail. But the financial ecosystem around it was exposed like a glass castle.
Blaming Trump is tempting, but superficial. His announcement was the match, not the fire. What really exploded was a hyper-leveraged market structure, with unstable collateral, faulty oracles and absent liquidity when it is needed most. A system that can evaporate $19.5 billion in 24 hours for a political tweet is not a mature system. Decentralization does not prevent crises if the design that supports it is fragile.
The October 10 episode leaves lessons that the ecosystem can no longer ignore. It is urgent to review which assets are accepted as collateral and under what conditions. Staggered liquidation mechanisms or automatic “circuit breakers” are needed to stop the cascade when prices collapse too quickly. Exchanges and protocols should publish aggregate leverage and total exposure metrics so that participants understand systemic risk. It is also essential to have stabilization funds that provide liquidity in stress scenarios. Transparency and prudent risk management must become pillars of the new stage, not advertising slogans.
The October collapse was neither a crisis of confidence nor a political attack; It was a crisis of financial design. Bitcoin did not fail: the ecosystem around it failed, which turned a macroeconomic warning signal into a self-referential massacre. Trump lit the spark, but the market was already soaked with fuel.}
And when gunpowder is the leverage, it doesn’t take much more for everything to explode.
The real enemy was leverage.