The rescue that lasted 29 hours.

By Tuesday afternoon FTX had stopped paying out, and the market had spent the morning selling. At 16:03 UTC Bankman-Fried posted that FTX had reached an agreement with Binance; CZ confirmed a non-binding letter of intent six minutes later. The market moved in the minute of the first post: BTC added 0.8% and SOL 2.7% before the 16:04 bar opened.

The coin that moved most was Binance’s own. BNB rose — in 24 minutes, to —. It was back below its pre-deal price by —, and an hour after that the whole market was in free fall: BTC went from — at — to — at —.

A rescue that is announced but not yet done tells the market two things: the buyer thinks it may be worth saving, and it needed saving. By Tuesday evening the market was trading the second.

Solana was the coin closest to FTX. Bankman-Fried had backed it early and Alameda held a lot of it, so when FTX went, SOL was where the selling was heaviest. It was also where the people who quote prices pulled back hardest.

Overnight, the 25 price levels nearest the middle of Binance’s SOL perpetual held about — of bids and offers. Through Wednesday afternoon they held — of that, on average. BTC’s book was thinner too, at —, but nothing like SOL’s.

A thin book costs whoever has to trade. The worst 5% of SOL trades filled — bps past the best price overnight and — bps on Wednesday afternoon, at a time when a lot of people had to.

A perpetual future has no expiry, so nothing forces it to meet the coin’s price. Funding does the job instead: when the perpetual trades below the spot index, shorts are paid by longs, and anyone who can buy the perpetual and sell the coin collects that payment until the gap closes. Normally it keeps the two within a few hundredths of a percent.

On Wednesday it didn’t. Through the afternoon Binance’s SOL perpetual traded — below its index on average, and — at —. Funding sat at −0.75% for fifteen hours, then −1.5%, then −2%; OKX’s reached —. Binance’s mark price, the one it values positions at, stopped at exactly 20% under the index and sat there for — minutes while trades printed lower. The gap stayed open anyway. Closing it needs SOL to sell, and anyone holding SOL that couldn’t be sold, on FTX or locked up, could hedge it only by selling the perpetual.

Positions show the same thing. Open interest in Binance’s SOL perpetual rose to — its Tuesday-midnight level in coins, and on OKX to —. At a third of the price, though, those positions were worth about what they had been: — at midnight, — at the peak. BTC’s and ETH’s perpetuals never traded more than 2% from their index. The research on perpetual futures finds funding turned negative across solvent exchanges as FTX failed; SOL is that pattern at its most extreme.

The worst of Tuesday came at 19:32. In that one minute BTC traded from $17,442 down to $16,830 on Binance. Two minutes later it traded as high as $18,232. On a daily chart it is a wick; in the minute bars it is a market with nobody quoting.

Watch the columns rather than the price. The spread between the best bid and ask went from a twentieth of a basis point to whole basis points. The dollars sitting at those two prices, normally close to a million, fell to a few tens of thousands. The worst 5% of trades filled tens of basis points from the best price. Within five minutes the spread and slippage were most of the way back. The dollars at the top of the book were not.

Switch to SOL: the same minutes, much worse. Its worst trades filled nearly 2% from the best price.

On Saturday 5 November SOL traded at —. Four days later it touched $9.42. The next day it rallied —. On Friday FTX filed for bankruptcy.

The bounce didn’t last. SOL ended the year at —, below its — close on Wednesday 9 November. The two days on this page priced in most of what the next two months confirmed, and you can see them happening in the minute data: the book emptying, the perpetual trading below the coin, shorts piling in while being paid to stay.

Every chart here comes from Aperiodic’s 1-minute microstructure metrics: order-book depth, order flow, open interest, funding, and mark and index prices, computed point-in-time from raw exchange feeds for every perpetual on Binance and OKX back to 2019, and on Hyperliquid since 2025. The same calls replay any day, without touching a raw L2 update.