The Chopping Block: Inside the $19B+ Perp Crash, ADL Explained, Binance’s USDe/Staked-Token Depeg, and the Hyperliquid Whale Debate
Welcome to The Chopping Block — where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week, Doug Colkitt, Founder Ambient Finance & Founding Contributor at Fogo, joins us as one of the wildest weekends in crypto history drags us back on air: a record $19B+ in liquidations, gas spiking toward $400, exchange APIs wobbling, and ADL ripping through perps as hedges vanished. We unpack what ADL actually does, why delta-neutral farmers got nuked, and how Binance’s USDe and staked ETH/SOL pegs snapped amid index design and mint/redeem gaps—followed by refunds. We get into HLP vs. LLP (vaults vs. winning traders), the Hyperliquid “whale” short ahead of the tariff tweet, cross-margin reflexivity that torched alts, and why market makers wore outsized pain. Then we zoom out to infra: sequencers, force-inclusion in practice, and the case for on-chain clearing plus real insurance funds before the next
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Show highlights
🔹 Record wipeout — $19B+ liquidations, 1.6M traders rekt, gas spiking to ~$400 while major exchanges wobbled.
🔹 ADL, decoded — What happens when perps run out of counterparties; socialized losses, P&L/leverage ranking, and why hedges vanished.
🔹 Delta-neutral nuked — Cross-venue long/short farmers turned naked as ADL picked off one leg first.
🔹 Binance peg breaks — USDe to ~$0.68 on Binance, staked ETH/SOL snapped; refunds >$250M after index/oracle and mint-redeem gaps.
🔹 Flows vs. “attack” — Earn users rushing to USDT + copy-trade momentum likely amplified the depeg more than cunning index games.
🔹 DeFi vs. CeFi — Perp DEX performance broadly comparable; transparency gaps in ADL policies and liquidation mechanics laid bare.
🔹 Vaults vs. traders — HLP vs. LLP outcomes show who platforms chose to protect in tail events—and the retention risks of clipping winners.
🔹 OI collapse — Hyperliquid open interest ~15B → ~6B; cross-margin reflexivity helped nuke alts far worse than BTC.
🔹 Why it felt one-sided — Market-maker/API failures and risk misallocation made typically “safe” actors eat outsized losses.
🔹 The whale short — A massive Hyperliquid short pre-tariff tweet sparks insider-vs-coincidence debate.
🔹 Infra faceplants — Sequencers down, force-inclusion in theory only, docs offline—while base L1s largely kept ticking.
🔹 What to fix — On-chain clearing, real insurance funds, sane ADL ranking, robust mint/redeem, and better index/oracle design before the next shock.
Hosts
⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly
Guest
⭐️ Doug Colkitt, Founder Ambient Finance & Founding Contributor at Fogo
Disclosures
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
01:11 $19B+ Liquidated
04:35 Personal Experiences & Reactions
08:30 Understanding Auto De-leveraging (ADL)
14:37 Binance & USDe Incident
23:19 DeFi vs CeFi Performance
26:05 Zero-Sum & Greedy Algorithms
34:26 Vaults & Trader Protection
39:43 Market Reactions & Trader Sentiments
44:33 Infrastructure Failures & OI Collapse
46:56 Insider Trading Allegations & Market Manipulation
52:14 Future of Perpetual DEXs
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