A single erroneous share trade on South Korea’s Nextrade exchange fed bad price information into Hyperliquid’s third-party price oracle, liquidating 960 accounts in seconds. The SKHYNIX perpetual crashed around 20%, dropping from $1,131 to $900 late Monday night, decoupling from other exchanges. The trade, placed during pre-market, sold SK Hynix stock 30% below the previous close with thin liquidity. The oracle consumed the price within seconds, triggering a 15.6% drop and automatic liquidations. Auto-deleveraging transferred $10.8 million to profitable short positions. The incident highlights risks in permissionless oracle-based derivatives.
A single erroneous share trade on South Korea’s Nextrade exchange fed bad price information into Hyperliquid‘s third-party price oracle, liquidating 960 accounts in seconds. The SKHYNIX perpetual on Hyperliquid crashed around 20% almost instantly late Monday night, dropping from $1,131 to as low as $900, completely decoupling from pricing elsewhere on crypto exchanges.
On-chain data indicates the entire cascade stems from a single share trade placed from Seoul. It appears that during the pre-market window before trading opened on the South Korean Nextrade exchange, there was an order to sell stock for major chip manufacturer SK Hynix placed 30% below the previous closing price. This order may have been placed by accident.
With thin pre-market liquidity, there were no competing orders on Nextrade at that moment, and that single trade briefly set the price of the stock on that exchange. The price corrected back to market value within two minutes, but by that time, the XYZ oracle responsible for setting the price for this stock on Hyperliquid had already consumed and relayed the information.
Just four seconds after Nextrade opened for trading, the SKHYNIX oracle price plummeted 15.6%, and liquidations began about two seconds later. X.com user MarketAlpha calculated that 960 accounts lost $57 million in a liquidation cascade as a result of this oracle error, with $17.3 million in realized losses.
The backstop then triggered auto-deleveraging against profitable short positions, with $10.8 million in gains realized across 100 accounts. The largest gains and losses for individual accounts were $2.55 million and $2.05 million, respectively. Surprisingly, the flash crash mimicked a real stock price correction of around 15% that took place hours later on the open market.
Hyperliquid staff have pointed out that the exchange is permissionless and that SKHYNIX is deployed and operated by XYZ, which is reportedly investigating the issue but has not released a statement.
