A Year Later, 10/10 Is Shaping Up to Be a Blip in Crypto’s History
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WHAT HAPPENED
Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of an unfortunate event in the crypto market.
On Oct. 10, 2025, at 20:50 UTC, President Trump posted on Truth Social threatening 100% tariffs on China. Over the next 24 hours, more than $19 billion in leveraged crypto positions were liquidated, the largest notional deleveraging on record and nearly double the previous high of roughly $10 billion on April 17, 2021. Bitcoin fell from $122,000 to the low $106,000s before rebounding. Equities sold off too, with the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%, their worst days since April of that year.
The long tail took the worst of it. Tokens outside BTC and ETH fell about 33% within 25 minutes, and on Binance, ATOM and ENJ briefly traded near zero as collateral was dumped into empty order books. About 1.62 million accounts were liquidated, roughly 87% of them longs. Hyperliquid and Bybit accounted for 75% of liquidations, and Hyperliquid triggered auto-deleveraging (ADL) for the first time in more than two years, force-closing profitable shorts to keep the exchange solvent.
Binance had its own crisis. After the main BTC and ETH selloff, the USDe stablecoin fell to about $0.65 on Binance even though issuer Ethena’s mint-and-redeem functions kept working and the token traded at par on most other venues. The wrapped tokens wBETH and BNSOL hit 80% to 90% discounts to their underlying assets. Binance was in the middle of moving margin calculations for those assets from market prices to redemption values, but the change wasn’t finished in time. It later distributed about $300 million to affected users and launched a $100 million low-cost loan program for market makers, while disclaiming liability for traders’ losses.
OUR TAKE
A year after 10/10, the crypto market looks fundamentally different…for the better. Two shifts stand out: regulation and token design.
Despite the CLARITY Act stalling in the Senate, the SEC and CFTC have pushed forward with the guidance the market needs (as we’ve written about here, here, and here, and below). A CFTC pilot now lets bitcoin, ether, and USDC serve as derivatives collateral, futures commission merchants can accept those assets as margin, and the SEC has opened a path for tokenized stocks to trade onchain. The GENIUS Act’s stablecoin framework is on track to take effect in January 2027. Issuers aren’t waiting for it. Onchain real-world assets grew from ~$28 billion to $39 billion over the past year, and tokenized stocks alone went from $650 million to nearly $3.3 billion, a 5x increase. Both are still a fraction of the overall market size, but the direction has never been clearer.
Token design has improved just as much. A year ago, most tokens were governance rights with no claim on the business. That’s changed, and prices reflect it. Excluding stablecoins, wrapped tokens, tokenized commodities, and liquid staking tokens, eight of the top 50 tokens are currently trading above their 10/10 levels. Most of those share two traits – a durable underlying business, and a mechanism that ties that business’s value to the token. That shift makes crypto far more investable. It also makes it easier for outside investors to tell which projects have product-market fit and shows crypto can work as a platform on which companies launch, grow, and turn a profit. It’s also thinning the herd for projects with no real traction, with a growing number announcing shutdowns in recent months.
10/10 did nothing to catalyze these changes. But that’s the point. In retrospect, it’s looking more and more like a blip in crypto’s longer growth trajectory. Bitcoin and other majors still trade below their 10/10 levels. Onchain activity hasn’t caught up, with monthly application fees and DEX volumes (two good gauges of onchain usage) still below their October 2025 levels. But the fundamentals driving crypto’s growth and adoption look materially better.
That doesn’t mean everything has been resolved. The 10/10 unwind still lacks a full public accounting, so it’s hard to say whether the fixes needed to prevent a repeat are in place. Some venues have tightened liquidation engines and margin requirements, oracles have improved, and more spot and futures trading has moved to onchain venues as traders look for transparency. That shift traces back to 10/10 itself. While centralized venues froze, Aave liquidated about $180 million in loans without downtime and Uniswap cleared a record $10 billion-plus in volume. But auto-deleveraging remains unsolved, market depth never fully returned, and the core problem of correlated leverage on fragmented liquidity hasn’t changed. The best argument against a repeat is that leverage sits well below last October’s peak and exchanges now carry a wider mix of assets, including stocks and commodities, which makes their exposures less correlated.
But for the most part, the market that crashed on 10/10 doesn’t really exist anymore, while the one that replaced it is just starting to get priced in.