Crypto crash liquidations face massive data gap as public records contradict $18B Solana claim

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. SRI reported roughly $18 billion in liquidations over 14 hours during the Oct. 10, 2025 crypto crash, including $3.21 billion in a single minute, and argued that opaque centralized venues failed while transparent on-chain finance kept functioning.

The crash records point to a more specific conclusion. Public data made it possible to reconstruct a large auto-deleveraging event on Hyperliquid, as well as deficits and oracle delays at Aave. ESMA later said Binance's internal collateral pricing amplified forced selling. Transparency exposed the mechanics of stress across market structures; it did not turn one venue category into a proxy for safety.

Auto-deleveraging, or ADL, is a last-resort derivatives mechanism that reduces profitable traders' positions when liquidations and risk buffers cannot keep a venue solvent. It differs from ordinary liquidation, which closes a losing position after its collateral falls below a required threshold. Regulators need comparable records to separate either mechanism from an outage, an oracle delay or a venue-local pricing failure.