The futures market for Plasma’s unreleased XPL token on decentralized exchange Hyperliquid experienced one of its most volatile trading episodes to date overnight, with more than $160 million in open interest wiped out in less than 10 minutes.
More than 80% of outstanding positions were liquidated, collapsing open interest from $160 million to just $30 million while clearing out the entire sell-side of the order book.
One trader wrote how they were trying to “hedge their XPL position with 1x leverage,” only for price to be “manipulated” resulting in the loss of $1.4 million.
The price of XPL spiked to as high as $1.80, rising by more than 200% within two minutes to spur a series of massive liquidations.
One trader reportedly triggered the carnage by going long tens of millions of dollars in XPL, effectively emptying the order book and forcing a cascade of auto-deleveraging.
The wallet netted $16 million in profits within a minute of unwinding part of the position, while still maintaining a long exposure of over 15 million XPL worth $10 million.
Another trader, known on X as Techno_Revenant, closed a $20 million long via auto-deleveraging and netted nearly $25 million in gains. Others were less fortunate: “1x no leverage, account destroyed, only hedging 50% xpl allocation,” X user StableDruid wrote.
The chaos comes just days before the official launch of Plasma’s XPL token. Plasma, a stablecoin-focused blockchain backed by Founders Fund, Framework Ventures, and Bitfinex, recently filled a $250 million USDT yield program on Binance in under an hour.