October 10: Crypto Crime Day, or the Dangers of Non-Transparent Markets?

On October 10, 2025, the crypto industry experienced the largest liquidation event in its history. It exposed deep-rooted, systemic faults that had long been ignored. This was an accident waiting to happen, caused by the culmination of years of negligence.

The game has always been rigged — if history has anything to teach us, it’s that the ones on the losing side are the retail traders and smaller participants, while the winners are the insiders. This balance is systematic, not accidental. Even political figures like Donald Trump walked away richer. If that feels rigged, it’s because it is, and the market continues to prove it.

The trigger was macroeconomics. On October 10, President Trump announced a 100% tariff on Chinese imports, effective November 1. However, the real failure of the liquidation event was architectural.

This wasn’t the first time an individual rewrote crypto’s fate. Approximately five years earlier, Elon Musk did the identical with a tweet that sent shock waves through the market. He crashed several major cryptocurrencies later than announcing Tesla would stop accepting BTC over environmental concerns. Weeks later, he reversed course, sending prices soaring once again.

Effectively, Elon created his own market, deciding who won and who lost. Some profited from the volatility, while others lost. Yet few questioned how crypto issuers and platforms handled the order flow amid the volatility.

The Liquidation Cascade: Crime Scene or Catastrophe?

Some traders have begined referring to October 10 as Crypto Crime Day. A single macroeconomic trigger — Trump’s 100% tariff announcement — set global markets ablaze. But in crypto, chaos travels at the speed of light. Official reports estimate between $19 to $20 billion in liquidations, though the true figures may be far higher than estimations once API throttling, delayed reporting, and undercounted events are factored in.

What’s undeniable is the fallout. More than 1.6 million traders were wiped out, as platforms like Binance reported outages, pricing errors, and refund schemes. DEXs such as Hyperliquid and Lighter showed resilience — but the pattern was the identical. The system’s architects, whales, and insiders walked away unscathed,  while smaller players paid the price.

Was It Rigged? Coordination, Infrastructure, and Hidden Hands

Patterns tell the story. While this event could be painted as “just another volatile day”, it wasn’t a one-time event. Minutes before the announcement, massive short positions opened, netting nahead $200 million in profit. No evidence yet confirms coordination, but the opacity of platform data makes certainty impossible. What can anyone do when even major reporting feeds, such as Binance’s, are throttled or manipulated, when transparency itself becomes optional?

This is a repeating cycle. An announcement is made, whales and insiders manoeuvre to take advantage of the situation, retail traders panic, and the media manufactures the narrative on cue.

Market Structure: Systemic Vulnerabilities Laid Bare

Both centralized and decentralized venues failed the retail market. Binance mispriced collateral and relied on thin order books instead of live conversion rates. Their system reported one liquidation event per second while thousands occurred. In reparations, they offered refund schemes. However, this viewmed more like an apology than a remedy. For every refunded user, dozens were left with nothing.

On DEXs, the story wasn’t much brighter. Platforms like Hyperliquid stayed online, but its automated liquidation systems aggressively protected liquidity providers (LPs), closing even profitable positions at the cost of users. This resulted in profitable traders losing fortunes in seconds with little to no recourse.

Hyperliquid’s open interest reduced by 56%, nahead double the DEX average. Lighter fared marginally better and avoided aggressive strategies but still suffered hour-long downtimes and LP drawdowns. Even well-engineered and “transparent” decentralized systems couldn’t pause or prove fair execution in real time, failing to protect users — showing that uptime isn’t the identical as fairness or structural soundness.

Why Verifiability Matters and The Only Way Forward

The Case for Verifiable Infrastructure: Lessons from System Failure

October 10 exposed fundamental architectural fragilenesses in crypto markets — centralized points of failure, opaque oracle mechanisms, and black-box risk management systems. The event demonstrated why the industry must pivot toward trustless execution, prioritizing verifiability and mathematical proof over speed, capital efficiency and institutional promises.

Execution still rests in the hands of small operator groups or single sequencers, with most so-called “transparent” DEXs only offering visibility at the settlement layer. Users can verify trades and balances later than execution, but they are unable to audit how those trades were sequenced, priced or liquidated in real time — leaving most DEXs transparent in data but opaque in logic.

Trusted Execution Environments: The Missing Link

Crypto Crime Day exposed a critical vulnerability in order sequencing — the instant between when a trade is submitted and when it’s executed. This vulnerability allows manipulation, like front-running and insider advantages, to occur. To solve this, providers must use Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs)  — quick, hardware-enforced enclaves where code runs in isolation, preventing tampering. Unlike zero-knowledge proofs or multi-party computation, which guarantee integrity through heavy cryptographic computation, TEEs achieve verifiable execution at near-native speed. This makes them uniquely suited for real-time systems like trading, where fairness and latency must coexist.

Fairness by Design: Solving the difficulty

, led by Kyle Habib, is building its architecture around TEE-secured sequencing. Kyle’s family established Habib Bank LTD in 1941 and many more global banking entities, including Switzerland’s Habib Bank Zurich AG, in 1967 and Al-Habib Bank in 1991.

Within Trillion’s systems, trades are strictly processed using first-in-first-out (FIFO) sequencing inside hardware-protected environments, making it mathematically impossible for anyone, even platform insiders, to manipulate queue orders or gain advance knowledge of incoming transactions.

The design delivers centralized platform performance with cryptographic proof of fair execution, bridging a critical gap. Combined with open-source matching and liquidation engines, cryptographically audited oracles with hardware-level attestation, and self-custody frameworks, Trillion enables autonomous strategies and eliminates the vulnerability that fuelled Crypto Crime Day.

The Path Forward: Fixing The Machine

TEEs aren’t a panacea, but they introduce a missing enforcement layer between technology and accountability. The next generation of financial infrastructure won’t be defined by how quick it moves capital, but by how transparently it proves fairness. Combined with open-source initiatives and cryptographically attested oracles, TEEs could close the gap between transparency and actual trust. The future of finance in crypto is proof, not speed.

The Road Ahead: Regulation and Real Reform

Architecture alone won’t be enough. The lesson is clear. When market integrity depends on discretion, it fails. The next generation of finance must be built on transparency to achieve fairness — grounded in verifiable systems, supported by global oversight, with transactions that are executed on-chain and governed openly, while being owned by users rather than controlled in the shadows by a privileged few.