The selling started on Binance, according to a review of the trades by David Jeong, chief executive of trading firm Tread.fi, who placed the first large SanDisk and Micron sell orders on Binance at 21:21:59 UTC.
Less than a second later, orders hit Hyperliquid, a crypto exchange where Trade XYZ lists stock-tracking contracts, and roughly 10 addresses opened bets against six chip-linked contracts within 1.8 seconds.
Binance handled about $21.9 million of SanDisk trading in that first minute, against $3.1 million on Trade XYZ.
Memory-chip shares were already coming off a rough week as investors weighed new competition from Chinese chipmaker CXMT.
With the stock market shut, there was no real share price for these contracts to follow, so traders were reacting only to each other. Trade XYZ’s rules let trading on the platform set its own reference prices until outside stock quotes come back.
Those quotes return when U.S. markets open Monday, which will show how far Saturday’s prices strayed from where the shares actually trade.