Benson Sun
Benson Sun|Oct 15, 2025 17:07
If we only look at ATOM's lowest price of 0.001, it indeed doesn't affect contract liquidation, because the mark price for perpetual contracts excludes quotes that deviate too much. But there's a key reality being overlooked—the spillover effect of spot price discovery. The pricing power for altcoins' USDT spot trading pairs lies with Binance. If you take a closer look at the lowest points of USDT altcoin trading pairs on 10/11, they were generally much lower than USD trading pairs. And I'm talking about a shocking discount of over 50%, not just a minor 1-5% difference. This kind of massive decoupling between USDT trading pairs and USD trading pairs almost points to one possibility—that something seriously went wrong at Binance, the central hub for USDT pricing power. Other exchanges like OKX, Bybit, Bitget, Gate, and Kucoin don't have this level of market influence. Only Binance's price distortion could collectively drag down offshore market USDT quotes. When Binance's spot prices show abnormalities, even if perpetual contracts' mark prices don't directly use Binance's data, the entire market's price transmission chain is still affected. Mark prices are just the anchor for liquidation, not the starting point for price discovery. Take ATOM as an example from the text: Even excluding Binance's abnormal 0.001 price, the lowest price for ATOM/USDT on other offshore exchanges was around 1.5-1.6, while the lowest price for ATOM/USD on Coinbase was 2.872. That's nearly a 100% price difference. For a coin with a market cap ranking around 50, this is an extremely absurd situation. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Even without comparing to Coinbase's USD quotes, just looking at horizontal comparisons between offshore exchanges, Binance still had over 100 coins with lowest prices that were more than 10% lower than the second-lowest quotes from competitors. This kind of phenomenon didn't even occur during the most extreme black swan event on 3/12. Therefore, it's reasonable to infer that the core "gravitational center" causing USDT trading pair prices to be generally much lower than USD trading pairs is Binance itself. You can refer to the analysis report I made for more details: https://binance-deviation-report.(github.io)/ If on 10/11, the contract market had liquidated contracts based on USD trading pair prices, the liquidation volume would have been significantly reduced. As for what exactly went wrong with Binance on that day, the industry still owes us an explanation.
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