Leverage The biggest factor in the Friday crash was leverage. As I described in my most recent recap, crypto leverage — whether through borrowing programs, margin trading, or perpetual futures — creates a cycle of risk that can rapidly snowball. Borrowers often borrow against, say, bitcoin in order to buy more bitcoin. This creates a feedback loop of risk: when bitcoin prices fall, borrowers simultaneously lose value on their original collateral and on their newly acquired bitcoin, rapidly pushing them toward overleveraged positions. When numerous borrowers are forced to liquidate at once, the resulting sell pressure can create a snowball effect that drives prices down further and becomes very difficult to stop. This is precisely what happened. Price dips from the first wave of crypto sell-offs caused some leveraged positions and crypto loans to be automatically liquidated as platforms determined there wasn’t sufficient margin to keep them open.c As exchanges forcibly liquidated these positions, they contributed to the sell pressure, causing prices to drop further, triggering more margin calls — the classic crypto “death spiral”.

And some traders don’t just borrow crypto against dollars or stablecoins, but borrow volatile cryptoassets against other volatile cryptoassets. In crashes like this, where the prices of many cryptocurrencies were all simultaneously dropping, these positions were even more volatile because traders’ debt burden was growing as their collateral value was diminishing — causing positions to be liquidated much more rapidly than if the collateral was fixed. And in these types of positions, if a trader is forcibly liquidated, exchanges sometimes need to sell off the loan collateral as well as the borrowed asset, causing sell pressure for both assets. As prices fall, those trading on leverage are often given an opportunity to restore their positions to a “healthy” state by adding more collateral, thus increasing their margin level. But with the often slow process of converting fiat currency into cryptocurrency, often the only option for traders to obtain more crypto to use as collateral in an emergency is to sell off other crypto assets. This contributes to overall sell pressure as traders panic-sell assets to shore up their leveraged positions. And in rapidly falling markets, traders can be wiped out before they have any chance to add collateral.

These issues were amplified by crypto exchange glitches, where malfunctioning price feeds and de-pegged assets caused erroneous liquidations based on inaccurate prices. (Binance later paid out $283 million to compensate users who had been erroneously liquidated due to apparent de-pegs on their platform,7 plus another $400 million to traders and institutions that were wiped out due to legitimate liquidations.8) On platforms where trades failed or faced significant delays, some customers watched their leveraged positions get forcibly liquidated in front of their eyes as they were unable to top up collateral.

While leverage exists in traditional markets too, the crypto industry takes it to new extremes. Traditional brokers typically limit margin trading to 2–4× leverage, require stable assets like dollars or blue-chip stocks as collateral, and must follow strict regulatory requirements around position monitoring and risk management. But crypto exchanges routinely offer leverage up to 100× or more, accept volatile cryptocurrencies as collateral, and operate with minimal oversight. Traditional markets also have circuit breakers and trading halts that can pause cascading liquidations, and brokers typically follow careful procedures with multiple warning thresholds before forcing positions to close. In crypto, a position can be liquidated before a trader even knows they’re in trouble.