Tokenized SanDisk bets saw more liquidations than XRP as Asia’s chip rout wipes out $800 million

Traders betting on SanDisk lost more to forced liquidations over the past 24 hours than traders betting on $XRP — a sign of how much leverage on crypto exchanges now sits on chip stocks.

About $803 million in leveraged positions were liquidated across 10 exchanges, according to CoinGlass. A liquidation happens when an exchange forcibly closes a trader’s borrowed position because their losses have eaten through the collateral. Longs, or bets on higher prices, made up $694 million of that, or 86%, and 172,113 traders were hit.

Most of the damage came in a burst. About $595 million, nearly three-quarters of the day’s total, was liquidated in the last 12 hours, as South Korea’s KOSPI fell more than 6% and bitcoin slid to just under $81,000. The largest single wipeout was a $9.65 million bitcoin long on Binance, closed at about $81,773. Binance accounted for half of all liquidations.

Bitcoin led with $181 million in liquidations, and ether was close behind at $178 million despite its much smaller market. SOL bets lost $60 million, ZEC $24 million and NEAR $22 million.

Stock contracts showed up next. Perpetual futures tracking SanDisk, the U.S. memory-chip maker, saw $19.09 million liquidated, just above the $19.04 million for HYPE and the $18.78 million for $XRP. These perpetual futures let traders bet on a stock’s price around the clock on crypto venues, without an expiry date. Contracts on SK Hynix and Micron, along with SOXL, a triple-leveraged U.S. semiconductor ETF, also appeared on the heatmap, with $7.21 million liquidated on SOXL.

Those losses lined up with the selloff in Seoul. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix each fell about 8% on worries over AI-related valuations and competition from Chinese memory-chip makers, CoinDesk reported.

Oil went the other way. Contracts on WTI and Brent crude were among the few on the map where short bets made up most of the liquidations, as Brent held near $106 after a three-day rally.

The flow has since reversed. Of the $74 million liquidated over the past four hours, $59 million, or 79%, came from shorts, as bitcoin climbed back above $83,000.

With bullish bets behind 86% of the day’s wipeouts and short sellers now taking the losses, bitcoin heads into Thursday’s U.S. inflation report with much of its long leverage cleared out.