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…