Volatility Isn’t The Enemy: Inefficiency Is
The post Volatility Isn’t The Enemy: Inefficiency Is appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
By Federico Variola, CEO of Phemex October 10, 2025, will be remembered as the day crypto markets experienced their largest liquidation event in history. Over $19 billion in positions evaporated within 24 hours. More than 1.6 million traders watched helplessly as their accounts were forcibly closed. President Trump’s announcement of 100% tariffs on Chinese imports triggered a cascade that nobody saw coming, but the scale of destruction that followed wasn’t just about geopolitics. As CEO of Phemex, I spent that day ensuring our traders could manage their positions during the crisis. I remember the moment the alerts started hitting my phone: $HYPE dropping to $25, $PEPE down 75%. My first thought was that we had a liquidity issue on our platform. I opened CoinGecko and saw those same prices across all exchanges. While our systems held, I watched competitors’ platforms fail their users at the worst possible moment. What I witnessed wasn’t a technology problem. It was a leadership problem. When Infrastructure Fails, Leaders Are Responsible In the immediate aftermath, the pattern was everywhere: failed log-ins preventing account access, failed stop-loss order execution, flash crashes where altcoins briefly touched zero before recovering. I saw disciplined traders lose everything because their exchange couldn’t execute their orders. The lack of liquidity across all exchanges hit even platforms operating smoothly. Exchanges like ours, with slippage protection in place, or Hyperliquid with auto-deleveraging, still faced the impact. When liquidity evaporates market-wide, no platform is immune. During extreme volatility, milliseconds matter. Traders with risk management should be protected when markets turn violent. But risk management only works if the infrastructure performs. When platforms fail, strategy doesn’t matter. The majority of liquidations on October 10 hit over-leveraged long positions built during Bitcoin’s rally above $125,000 earlier that week. While 85-95% of liquidations result from trader decisions,…
Filed under: News - @ October 22, 2025 3:27 pm