# Ghosts of the 100x: A Trader’s README

> “In bull runs, everyone’s a genius. In liquidation, you learn your true leverage.”  
> — anon

[![Build Status](https://img.shields.io/badge/status-liquidated-critical)](#)
[![Risk](https://img.shields.io/badge/risk-extreme-red)](#)
[![Leverage](https://img.shields.io/badge/leverage-100x-do_not_try)](#)
[![Exchange](https://img.shields.io/badge/exchange-multi-blue)](#)

## Table of Contents
- [Prelude](#prelude)
- [The Setup](#the-setup)
- [Catalyst: The Tariff Bomb](#catalyst-the-tariff-bomb)
- [Detonation: The Largest Liquidation Ever](#detonation-the-largest-liquidation-ever)
- [The Cascade](#the-cascade)
- [Post-Mortem](#post-mortem)
- [Lessons Learned](#lessons-learned)
- [Sources](#sources)

---

## Prelude

It was supposed to be another disciplined day in the green sea of candles.  
I’m Eli—ex-quant, now full-time degen with a tidy suite of TypeScript bots, a drizzle-ORM’d ledger, and a vaulted conviction that “this time, we’re early, not wrong.”

The dashboard glowed. BTC flirting above ATH. ETH cruising. Funding richer than almond milk.

I pushed one more deployment on Bun. Linted. Prettier ran. Unit tests green.

“Send it.”

---

## The Setup

- Stack:
  - Next.js dashboard for signals
  - Bun runtime bots
  - Drizzle ORM for trade logs on Postgres
  - WebSocket feeds, custom liquidation heatmap
- Strategy:
  - Long bias across BTC/ETH, some SOL perps
  - Cross-collateral, high conviction, too much composure
- Leverage:
  - Responsible on paper, irresponsible in practice
- Risk Controls:
  - Soft stops; hard belief

Code excerpts looked pristine. PnL looked inevitable.

---

## Catalyst: The Tariff Bomb

Then came the macro nuke.

- Former U.S. President Donald Trump floated 100% tariffs on all Chinese imports.  
- Markets flipped to max risk-off.  
- Crypto, the leverage hall of mirrors, blinked first.

References:
- Coinglass: over $19B liquidated in 24h, the largest single-day event on record [1].
- CCN breakdown of the event and timeline [2][3].

---

## Detonation: The Largest Liquidation Ever

- Over $19B in liquidations within 24h; more than $7B in a single hour [2][3].
- BTC knifed from >$125k to sub-$102k intra-crash on some venues [2][3].
- ETH plunged >12–16%; altcoins painted the tape red [2][3].
- Hyperliquid leaderboard showed a massacre; 6,300 wallets in the red, 1,000+ fully wiped, 205 wallets lost $1M+ [1].

Eli’s cross-collateral “efficiency” became an accelerant.  
Where I saw “capital efficiency,” the market saw tinder.

---

## The Cascade

It wasn’t one blow; it was a chain:

1. Funding flips, order books thin.
2. Tariff shock detonates the first wall of longs.
3. Oracles, unified accounts, and venue-specific pricing quirks amplify slippage.
4. Liquidations beget liquidations.  
5. Bots—mine included—turn from alpha to accelerant.

On one venue, a stablecoin depegged locally, collateral marks sagged, and the margin math turned me into a forced seller at the worst ticks. Shorts feasted. I was dinner.

Leaderboard whispers later boasted a wallet banking hundreds of millions shorting into the slide [1][2]. I stared at my drizzle migrations, pristine, and thought: schema’s perfect—balance sheet isn’t.

---

## Post-Mortem

- My max drawdown model assumed venue independence. Reality: coupling.
- My circuit breakers paused entries, not forced exits.
- My stop hierarchy didn’t survive cross-venue gaps.
- I treated liquidation feeds as signals, not warnings.
- I overfit to up-only microstructure, underfit to macro shock.

The ledger showed it cleanly:

- BTC-PERP: closed by liquidation
- ETH-PERP: closed by liquidation
- SOL-PERP: closed by liquidation
- Collateral: atomized

I archived the session logs. The only green left was my CI badge.

---

## Lessons Learned

- Hard risk > soft conviction:
  - Use hard, venue-native server-side stops (OCO/TP/SL) with out-of-band kill switches.
- Collateral isolation:
  - Don’t let a single venue’s pricing model rehypothecate your entire book.
- Oracle and mark risk:
  - Prefer oracle-marked collateral where possible; avoid exotic collateral in stress.
- Cross-venue hedges:
  - Maintain delta hedges on uncorrelated rails; pre-wire “panic pairs” for immediate flattening.
- Latency-aware guards:
  - Build kill paths that don’t depend on your own infra under load.
- Size for dislocations:
  - Model 10–20% gaps in majors within minutes; 30–50% for alts.
- Practice black swans:
  - Chaos drills: yank a key collateral feed, simulate unified-account mark-down, replay liquidation tapes.
- Humility > hopium:
  - When tape disagrees, the tape is right.

---

## Sources

- [1] Coinglass: “‘Largest Ever’ Crypto Liquidation Event…” (over $19B in 24h; Hyperliquid stats, 6,300 wallets red, 1,000+ fully liquidated)  
  https://www.coinglass.com/news/721776

- [2] CCN: “Crypto’s $19 Billion Liquidation Explained” (timeline, figures, per-asset color)  
  https://www.ccn.com/education/crypto/cryptos-19-billion-liquidation-explained-trump-china-tariff-leverage-crash/

- [3] CCN: “Trump, Binance, or Hackers Behind the Black Swan?” (scale, $7B in one hour, venue-specific dynamics)  
  https://www.ccn.com/news/crypto/cryptos-largest-liquidation-trump-binance-the-black-swan/

---

## Epilogue

I rebuilt the bot with fewer toggles and more brakes.  
Swapped swagger for sanity checks.  
Kept the README. Pinned the badges.  
And left one comment at the top of the repo:

```ts
// if (market_is_crazy()) flat();
```

Because the cleanest code in the world can’t margin-call the market.