Bitcoin’s $19 billion crash still shapes crypto risk a year later

One year ago, a single tariff announcement erased more than $19 billion in leveraged crypto bets in about a day. It remains the largest derivatives liquidation episode the market has ever recorded. How the 10/10 crash unfolded The trigger came from Washington, not from inside crypto. President Donald Trump announced a 100% tariff on Chinese imports, and markets that had been priced for good news suddenly had to reprice for a trade war. Crypto derivatives took the hit fastest. Forced liquidations topped $19 billion across exchanges within a 24-hour window. The damage reached over 1.6 million accounts. Most of the pain fell on traders betting prices would rise: long positions made up roughly $16–17 billion of the total. Bitcoin had set an all-time high of nearly $126,200 just four days earlier, on October 6. During the crash, it fell somewhere between 14% and 17% intraday, touching lows in the range of $102,000 to $107,000 before clawing some of it back. Open interest, the total value of outstanding derivatives contracts, dropped by more than 30% during the selloff. Across the broader crypto market, hundreds of billions in market capitalization vanished within hours. The fallout, and...