Crypto perpetual futures evolved

On March 12, 2020, BitMEX had just $20 million in buy orders against $200 million in pending liquidation sales. Its shutdown interrupted a liquidation cascade threatening the BTC derivatives market. That imbalance captures a recurring pattern in the evolution of crypto perpetual futures: crises drove changes to collateral, liquidation systems and the rules linking contracts to spot prices. Key takeaways Huobi developed auto-deleveraging before BitMEX adopted it. BitMEX’s shutdown interrupted the 2020 liquidation cascade BitMEX disconnected its servers during the March 12, 2020, crash, stopping pending liquidation orders from overwhelming the remaining bids. The exchange officially attributed its outage to a DDoS attack; the historical account describes Arthur Hayes pulling the platform offline to prevent systemic collapse. In just over twelve hours, Bitcoin’s price plunged from roughly $7,800 to $3,800.

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