Aperiodic Replay · 10.10.2025
At 20:50 UTC on Friday 10 October 2025, fifty minutes after US equities closed for the weekend, Trump posted that the US would add a 100% tariff on Chinese imports. Six minutes later the median Binance perpetual had half its usual order-book depth, with prices down only 4%. By 22:00 the median perpetual had printed a low 64% below its 20:49 close. We rebuilt the evening from Aperiodic’s depth, flow and open-interest data.
The trade war restarted after the equity close, so anyone needing to de-risk had only crypto to sell. At 20:49 there was … of perpetual open interest on Binance, OKX and Hyperliquid.
The commerce ministry announces export controls on rare earths and battery technology.
Trump calls China “very hostile” and says he is considering a massive increase in tariffs. BTC slips from $121k.
S&P 500 −2.7%, Nasdaq −3.6%, the worst day since April. From here, crypto is the only market trading.
The second post: an extra 100% tariff on Chinese imports from 1 November, plus export controls on critical software.
ohlcv and open_interest; post times from the UCSB Truth Social archive; index moves from AP.The replay
Nine perpetuals on three venues, 18:00 to 01:00 UTC. Candles and taker flow are 15-second bars built from every trade; depth, spread and open interest are 1-minute. The ladder shows the book at the playhead against its 20:00–20:45 average, dashed.
With US equities shut and nothing else open to hedge in, market makers cut their size. You can see it in the book several minutes before you can see it in price.
For every Binance perpetual we took the dollars resting in the top 25 levels, divided by that book’s own 20:00–20:45 average, and took the median across perpetuals. minutes after the post, the median book was at half its usual depth and the median price was down …. The cascade started minutes later, into books that were already thin.
l2_liquidity, 1-minute.A liquidation is a market sell the trader didn’t choose to send. When a long runs out of margin, the venue closes it at whatever the book pays. In a thin book that fill moves price far enough to reach the next position’s liquidation price.
Open interest counts the contracts still open, so its fall is a direct measure of positions closed. We value it at 20:49 prices so that falling prices don’t register as closures. On Hyperliquid, close to half of all open interest went in five minutes. Its liquidations ran out of bids, and for the first time in more than two years it fell back on cross-margin auto-deleveraging: closing profitable positions to cover the losing ones.
open_interest and ohlcv, 1-minute. Hyperliquid ADL: Wu Blockchain.BTC fell 13%. Further down the list, where books are quoted thinner, market sells kept filling against whatever bids were left, in some cases 80–90% below the last trade.
Each tile is one perpetual’s minute lows from 20:30 to 22:30, on a 0 to −100% scale; the dashed line is −50%. On Binance, three in four printed their low within the same four minutes, 21:19 to 21:23.
Drop is the lowest 1-minute low between 20:50 and 22:00, measured from the 20:49 close. Source: Aperiodic ohlcv, 1-minute, perpetuals with a full evening of trading.
Much of the post-mortem blamed individual venues, and some of that was fair. Binance spot printed ATOM at $0.001, and Binance’s collateral pricing turned a stablecoin depeg into extra liquidations. On perpetuals, though, the drops were shared.
Plot each coin’s drop on Binance against its drop on Hyperliquid, an on-chain venue with its own matching engine and liquidation design, and the points sit close to the diagonal. Arbitrage kept prices linked while depth thinned everywhere. The outlier is HYPE, Hyperliquid’s own token, which fell much less on Hyperliquid than on Binance or OKX.
BTC was back above $111,000 by 21:35. Depth came back much more slowly. Market makers whose short hedges had been auto-deleveraged were left holding unhedged inventory, and BitMEX Research found books stayed thinner for the rest of the quarter. At 01:00 UTC the median Binance book was still at about a third of its usual depth.
Binance paid about $283M to users hit by the depegs and moved collateral pricing to external indexes. USDe supply fell from roughly $15B to $8.5B within a month. Hyperliquid’s HLP vault, which took over liquidated positions, made around $40M.
BTC had set its all-time high four days earlier. It didn’t trade there again in 2025.
ohlcv, BTC-USDT perpetual, 1-day. Compensation: The Block; USDe supply: DL News; market makers: BitMEX via CoinMarketCap; HLP: CoinGecko.The charts come from Aperiodic’s precomputed 1-minute microstructure metrics: L1 and L2 depth, spreads, slippage, taker flow and open interest, built point-in-time from exchange feeds for every actively traded perpetual on Binance, OKX and Hyperliquid, 847 order books in all. The terminal’s 15-second candles and taker flow are aggregated from Aperiodic’s raw trades. No raw L2 updates were replayed for any of it.
l2_liquiditySize resting in the top 5, 10, 20 and 25 levels of each bookl1_liquidityBest bid and ask size, and the spreadslippageHow far past the best quote the worst 5% of trades filledflowTaker buys and sells per minuteopen_interestContracts still open, minute by minutederivative_priceMark and index price against the last tradeohlcvMinute bars for every perpetualraw/tradesEvery trade, behind the terminal’s 15-second candles and flowfrom datetime import date, datetime
import polars as pl
from aperiodic import get_metrics
book = get_metrics(
api_key="YOUR_KEY",
metric="l2_liquidity",
timestamp="exchange",
interval="1m",
exchange="binance-futures",
symbol="perpetual-BTC-USDT:USDT",
start_date=date(2025, 10, 10),
end_date=date(2025, 10, 11),
)
depth = book.filter(
pl.col("time").is_between(
datetime(2025, 10, 10, 20, 30), datetime(2025, 10, 10, 22, 0)
)
).select("time", (pl.col("bid_agg_25_avg") + pl.col("ask_agg_25_avg")).alias("btc_in_top_25"))Size execution against the depth that was actually there, model liquidity withdrawal before it shows in price, or watch it live. Full history for every perpetual: Binance from 2020, OKX from 2019, Hyperliquid from 2025.
Aperiodic Replays · No. 01 · Market data: Aperiodic metrics. News timeline: sources linked in place.aperiodic.io