Aperiodic Replay · 02–03.02.2025
On Saturday 1 February 2025 the US put tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China. Crypto was the only big market open to trade it. Through Sunday night ETH fell 28% and XRP 32%, and at 02:08 UTC on Monday 289 of Binance’s 322 perpetuals hit their low in the same minute. This is that night, minute by minute, rebuilt from Aperiodic’s order-book data on Binance and Hyperliquid.
Nothing broke and nobody was hacked. A whole market sold at once, into order books that got thinner the more it sold.
President Trump signs orders putting 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico and 10% on China, from Tuesday. Stock markets are shut until Monday.
EY Tax News ↗Crypto is the only big market open all weekend. On Sunday night UTC it starts to sell, and keeps selling into Asia’s Monday morning.
Cointelegraph ↗Almost every perpetual bottoms in the same minute. CoinGlass counts $2.24B liquidated over the day; Bybit’s CEO puts the true figure at $8–10B.
Benzinga ↗Mexico’s president says the tariffs on Mexico are paused for a month. BTC gets all of it back; ETH doesn’t.
CNN ↗The replay
Seven coins, two venues, every minute from Sunday 21:00 to Monday 18:00 UTC. ETH is the big one; switch to ADA or EIGEN for the worst of it, or to BTC for how little it moved. The ladder on the right is the order book at the playhead, against its Sunday 21:30–22:30 size in dashed outline.
In a crash, lows usually spread out: on 10 October 2025, the busiest minute held 147 of 465 Binance lows. On the night of 2 February they didn’t spread. — perpetuals printed their low in the same minute, 02:08 UTC, and on Hyperliquid, a different venue with different traders, the same minute held the most lows too.
Lows that line up to the minute point to selling that wasn’t about any one coin: whole accounts being closed, every position at once, as their margin ran out. The bottom came when that selling stopped, for everything together.
BTC fell 6.4% from Sunday 22:29. The median perpetual fell about 26%, and the worst fell more than a third. ETH, at 28%, fell further than most.
ohlcv, 1-minute, every USDT- or USDC-margined perpetual with data that night. OKX is left out: Aperiodic’s OKX data has no rows from 01:57 to 02:08, the minutes of the low.When prices fall fast, the people quoting them pull orders, and the next sell order meets a thinner book than the last. On Sunday night Binance’s books thinned at 22:40 and had refilled by midnight. Then, in the twelve minutes before 01:57, the median book went from — of its usual depth to a third.
By — the median Binance perpetual’s book held — of what it held between 21:30 and 22:30. Added up across every perpetual, the dollars within 25 levels went from — at 22:00 to — at —.
The books came back much faster than the prices. By 04:00 the median book held — of its Sunday depth, while the median perpetual was still — under its 22:29 price.
l2_liquidity, 1-minute.Open interest counts the positions still open. When longs are liquidated it falls, so in a liquidation cascade you would expect it to fall hardest at the bottom. That isn’t what Binance’s shows. At 02:08, after $4.3B of net selling, open interest across its perpetuals was — higher than at 22:29. Positions were being liquidated and closed, and new ones were opening almost one for one.
The positions came off afterwards: — by 04:00, and — by 15:25, as prices climbed back. That is — of everything open on Sunday night, closed into the rebound rather than the crash.
open_interest and flow, 1-minute.The bounce off 02:08 was quick, then Monday drifted until New York opened at 14:30 UTC. That morning in New York, Mexico’s president said the tariffs on Mexico were paused for a month. BTC closed above its Sunday 22:29 price at —. XRP, which had fallen 32%, was back by —.
ETH never got there. Its best close after the low, — at —, was still — under Sunday night. A crash that hits everything in the same minute doesn’t have to leave everything in the same place: by 18:00 BTC was — from 22:29 and ETH —.
ohlcv, 1-minute. The tariff pause: CNN, linked in the text.The counts on this page come from running the same few API calls over every perpetual on Binance and Hyperliquid: 1-minute prices, order-book depth, order flow and open interest, computed point-in-time from raw exchange feeds. Finding the minute 289 coins bottomed together is a loop and a group-by, not a week of parsing L2 updates.
from datetime import date
import polars as pl
from aperiodic import get_metrics
lows = []
for symbol in ["perpetual-ETH-USDT:USDT", "perpetual-XRP-USDT:USDT",
"perpetual-ADA-USDT:USDT", "perpetual-DOGE-USDT:USDT"]:
bars = get_metrics(
api_key="YOUR_KEY",
metric="ohlcv",
timestamp="exchange",
interval="1m",
exchange="binance-futures",
symbol=symbol,
start_date=date(2025, 2, 3),
end_date=date(2025, 2, 3),
)
lows.append(bars.sort("low").head(1).with_columns(symbol=pl.lit(symbol)))
# Every one of them: 2025-02-03 02:08 UTC
pl.concat(lows).select("symbol", "time", "low")Measure how far books thin before the low, test whether a strategy survives a minute when everything sells at once, or watch open interest for the positions that are left. Every perpetual on Binance since 2020, OKX since 2019 and Hyperliquid since 2025.
Aperiodic Replays · No. 04 · Market data: Aperiodic metrics. News timeline: sources linked in place.aperiodic.io