The crypto flash crash of 10 October 2025, measured on five exchanges

By the Crypto Alerts & Alarms team · Published 28 October 2026 · Figures from five exchanges’ public market data; news facts checked 28 October 2026

On 10 October 2025, crypto prices collapsed within an hour of a tariff post by President Trump at 20:50 UTC, and more than $19 billion of leveraged positions were liquidated in about a day, according to Galaxy Research and CoinGlass data cited by Cointelegraph. How far a coin fell depended on the exchange: measured from 20:00 UTC, Bitcoin’s lowest 1-minute price was 8.3% lower on Coinbase but 14.3% lower on Kraken, and XRP’s 33.9% lower on Coinbase but 59.5% on KuCoin.

Past figures, not a forecast. Unless another source is named, every price here comes from the five exchanges’ own public market data for that evening. It describes one night; another fast fall can look quite different.

What happened on 10 October 2025

Earlier that Friday, President Trump had threatened a “massive increase of Tariffs” on Chinese products (CNBC), and by 20:00 UTC Bitcoin was already 4.8% below that day’s high on Binance. In a later post he announced a 100% tariff on Chinese goods “over and above any tariff that they are currently paying”, starting on 1 November “or sooner” (NBC News). Galaxy Research dates that post to 20:50 UTC (Galaxy, 15 October 2025).

What followed was a wave of liquidations: leveraged positions closed by force when their margin ran out. Each forced close takes whatever resting bids are left, which pushes the price lower and can set off the next one. Galaxy counts more than $19 billion liquidated in about 24 hours and calls it “the largest notional crypto deleveraging on record”; Cointelegraph Research puts it at “more than $19 B”, from CoinGlass data. Amberdata found that “at exactly 21:15 UTC, $3.21 billion in cryptocurrency positions evaporated in a single minute” (Amberdata’s analysis, republished by Kaiko). In our data, the lowest minute for every coin except USDe came between 21:18 UTC and 21:28 UTC, and Galaxy’s own timeline has Bitcoin and Ether finding their troughs between 21:20 and 21:42 UTC.

What a flash crash is, and what a wick shows

A flash crash is a fall that is unusually fast and deep and that partly reverses within minutes or hours. There is no official size. On a candlestick chart, the thin line below a candle’s body is its wick: it marks the lowest price traded in that period, however briefly. A long wick on a 1-minute candle means the price reached that level within the minute and did not stay there. On Binance, AVAX/USDT printed a low 67.8% below its 20:00 price at 21:21 UTC, and the very next minute closed more than halfway back.

How far each coin fell on each exchange

For every coin it lists, Coinbase’s dollar pair fell the least, and for the smaller coins the gap is wide: XRP, Dogecoin and Avalanche printed lows more than 50% below their 20:00 price on Binance, Bybit and KuCoin. Bitcoin’s deepest print was on Kraken, and Solana’s on KuCoin, at 36.7% below its 20:00 price.

The quote currency explains almost none of this. Coinbase and Kraken price these coins in dollars and the other three in USDT, but in the minutes when the lows printed, USDT itself traded between $1.0000 and $1.0007 on Kraken, within 0.07% of a dollar. Even on one exchange the pair mattered: Coinbase’s BTC/USDT went as low as $103,100 at 21:20 UTC, while its BTC/USD stopped at $107,000. Each order book has its own resting bids, so each lowest price is set by trades on that book alone. That is also why an alert can fire at a price a chart from another exchange never showed: why the Bitcoin price differs between exchanges.

Minute by minute: every pair

Bitcoin and Ether were back within 5% of their 20:00 price, to stay, within half an hour of their lows on every exchange. By 23:00, 14 of the 34 pairs had done the same: every Bitcoin, Ether and USDe pair, and none of the Solana, XRP, Dogecoin or Avalanche pairs. XRP, Dogecoin and Avalanche were still more than 10% below their 20:00 price at 23:00 on all five exchanges.

USDe: one coin, four different lows

USDe is meant to hold a price of one dollar. On Binance’s USDE/USDT book its lowest 1-minute price was $0.6500, at 21:54 UTC, 35.0% below its 20:00 price. The lowest on Bybit was $0.9207, on KuCoin $0.9404 and on Kraken’s USD pair $0.9496. Galaxy Research says USDe “traded at par on most other venues” and dates its trough on Binance to 21:42 to 21:51 UTC; the single lowest 1-minute print came a few minutes later.

Cointelegraph Research, using order book data from Rena Labs, reports that liquidity on Binance’s USDe book fell from an average of $89 million to “a mere $2 M” by about 21:54 UTC (Cointelegraph, 15 October 2025). Binance described a “price depeg of USDE, BNSOL, and WBETH”, said it would compensate Futures, Margin and Loan users who held them as collateral and were affected by the depeg between 21:36 and 22:16 UTC, and said the redemption price would be added to the three tokens’ price index weights (Binance, 11 October 2025).

Even USDT moved that evening: on Kraken it printed as high as $1.0281 in the minute from 21:47 UTC, after the coin lows. For dollar tokens more generally, see how far USDT and USDC have moved off the peg.

When a price alert would have rung

The table below takes a level 10% under each pair’s own 20:00 UTC price, which is roughly what a 10% drop alert set at 20:00 would have used, and shows the first minute any trade reached it. This is what the candles show, not a record of alerts that fired.

The same alert on the same coin would have rung on one exchange and stayed silent on another. On Coinbase, Bitcoin’s lowest price was 8.3% below its 20:00 price, so a 10% level there was never reached; on the other four exchanges, trades reached it in the same minute, 21:19 UTC. Which pair you follow is the first choice in setting an alert, and on a night like this it decides whether the alert rings at all.

In Crypto Alerts & Alarms, each alert follows one pair on one exchange and is checked on our servers against that exchange’s live price feed, so it works with the app closed. It fires on the first price it receives at or past your level, as a push notification, which can ring as a full-screen alarm through silent mode on Android and go to Telegram too. Two limits matter on a night like 10 October:

• Brief prints can be missed. A price that came and went between two updates of the exchange’s feed is never seen, so the very lowest prints in these tables are not a promise of what an alert would have reported.
• An alert only tells you. It places no orders and never connects to an exchange account. It follows spot prices only, and has no futures, mark-price or liquidation alerts.

To size a percentage for a coin’s normal days, see how big a percentage alert should be; for how often Bitcoin has fallen this far before, see every big Bitcoin fall since 2017.

How we measured

Public market data for 10 October 2025, 20:00 to 23:00 UTC: 1-minute candles from Binance, Bybit, KuCoin and Coinbase, and for Kraken, 1-minute candles we built from every public trade in the window, because Kraken’s candle endpoint only reaches back 720 candles. Pairs: USDT on Binance, Bybit and KuCoin; USD on Coinbase and Kraken. Coinbase’s exchange has no USDe pair. Price at 20:00: the open of the 20:00 UTC minute. Kraken’s USDE/USD traded so rarely that it had no trade in that minute, so its price at 20:00 is its last earlier trade, in the minute from 15:06 UTC. Fall: the lowest 1-minute low before 23:00, against that price. Back within 5% to stay: the first minute, from the low on, from which every 1-minute close until 22:59 was at least 95% of the 20:00 price. Times are the minute each candle starts, in UTC.

Published figures for this night differ in the same way. Galaxy Research puts Bitcoin’s low at about $106,000 to $107,000, close to Coinbase’s, while Binance and Kraken printed lower; its USDe low of about $0.65 on Binance matches Binance’s candles. The date at the top shows when these figures were last calculated.

Common questions

Last updated: 28 October 2026. Spot a mistake? Email support@appsfromzero.com and we will correct it.