Solana Research Institute revived a July open letter to UK regulators on Aug. 14, repeating a claim of $18 billion in liquidations over 14 hours during the Oct. 10, 2025 crypto crash. Public records from Amberdata, Binance, Hyperliquid, and Aave cannot reconcile that total, and instead show distinct failures spread across centralized and on-chain venues.
Solana Research Institute, a Solana-aligned research group, used an Aug. 14 post to revive a July open letter by Angus Scott to the UK Financial Conduct Authority and other regulators. The group reported roughly $18 billion in liquidations over 14 hours during the Oct. 10, 2025 crash, including $3.21 billion in a single minute, and argued that opaque centralized venues failed while transparent on-chain finance kept functioning. Public records instead point to several distinct failures that a single total obscures.
The $18 billion figure has no matching method
Amberdata's six-exchange analysis also found a $3.21 billion peak at 21:15 UTC, with 93.5% of that minute's liquidations coming from forced selling. But for the full 14-hour window, Amberdata reported $9.89 billion, including $6.93 billion in the 40 minutes from 20:50 to 21:30 UTC. Solana Research Institute's July 23 letter gives no common venue universe or aggregation method that would reconcile its $18 billion figure with Amberdata's $9.89 billion. An ESMA review separately cited market estimates of about $19 billion in automated derivatives liquidations for the day, a different scope again.
Binance, Hyperliquid, and Aave show separate mechanics
Binance's postmortem said some of its modules glitched after 21:18 UTC and local prices for collateral assets, including USDe, BNSOL, and WBETH, dislocated after 21:36 UTC. Binance said two compensation batches for users liquidated because of those depegs totaled about $283 million, though its account gives no event-specific auto-deleveraging total. ESMA said Binance's use of internal collateral prices enabled local depegs to erase collateral value, triggering forced liquidations and cascading selling, while finding no observable spillover into traditional markets.
On Hyperliquid, a non-peer-reviewed reconstruction using public venue data found about $2.10 billion in auto-deleveraging across 34,983 individual executions in roughly 12 minutes. On Aave, a Chaos Labs report said some markets saw five-block price-update delays, with about $180 million liquidated and roughly $500,000 in bad debt and expected deficit; Chaos Labs estimated the protocol ended about $1.5 million net positive after fees and revenue offset those deficits.
FCA rules speed up data, not comparability
The FCA's June 2026 final cryptoasset framework requires UK qualifying trading platforms and principal dealers to publish post-trade information no later than one minute after execution, with larger platforms also facing pre-trade transparency duties. Yet the framework does not require standardized cross-venue reporting of liquidation volumes, auto-deleveraging use, or backstop losses. Public records made parts of the Oct. 10 crash measurable across three separate systems, but they still cannot support a single market-wide total.
Source: CryptoSlate
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