Plasma’s XPL token fell 17% in under one minute on Binance early on Sunday, 1 November. The XPL flash crash took the price from 8.57 US cents at 04:32 UTC to 7.11 cents by 04:33, and by 04:37 it had touched 6.90 cents, 20% below the 8.64-cent high set eight minutes earlier.
Binance data shows spot and futures prices fell together. Plasma’s last post on X before the drop came on 28 October and was about its Plasma One card app, and the account had posted nothing new by 06:00 UTC. At 06:00 UTC XPL traded near 7.3 cents, still about 14% under its level before the fall.
How the XPL flash crash unfolded on Binance
The market was quiet beforehand. Between 04:24 and 04:31 UTC, XPL changed hands on Binance spot at roughly $20,000 to $60,000 a minute. The slide picked up speed after about 04:32:10. In the minute that started at 04:32, about $988,000 traded and the price fell from 0.0857 to a low of 0.0711, printed at 04:32:55.
The perpetual futures contract, a futures bet that never expires, dropped at the same moment. About $11.2 million traded on it in that minute. Unlike Saturday’s STX spike, where spot ran ahead of futures, both markets fell together here. No single trade on Binance was larger than about $92,000, so the drop came from a rush of many smaller orders, not one huge sale. Traders who sold into waiting buy orders outweighed buyers $6.8 million to $4.1 million in that one minute.
What open interest did during the drop
Open interest is the number of futures contracts still open. On Binance’s XPL contract it stood near 575 million XPL at 04:20 UTC and was 583 million at 04:40, after the fall. It then eased to 556 million by 06:00. In dollar terms it slid from $49 million to $42 million, but only because each coin was worth less.
Open contracts stayed between 556 million and 583 million XPL from 04:20 to 06:00 UTC while the price lost about 14%, so the numbers show no mass closing of positions on Binance during the XPL flash crash.
The 25 November unlock and the 29 October drop
Tokenomist, a tracker of token supply schedules, lists the next XPL unlock for 25 November. That is 227.78 million XPL, 4.78% of the supply already released and about $16.4 million at current prices. An unlock hands tokens that were locked up to the people entitled to them. Tokenomist marks the date as pending verification.
Unlocks were also the backdrop for Quack AI’s Q token on Saturday. For XPL, the same-sized unlock landed on 25 October, worth about $16.9 million then. Sunday’s drop came a week after it, not on the day.
It was not the week’s first sharp fall. On 29 October XPL dropped about 12% during the 20:00 UTC hour, from 0.0768 to 0.0673, and was back above 0.0768 by 04:00 UTC on 30 October, a recovery of about eight hours.
XPL price levels holders can watch
Three prices matter now. Sunday’s low of 0.0690 is the first, and 0.0673 from 29 October is the second. Below both sits 0.0601, the lowest price Binance has recorded for XPL, set on 10 June. Above, 0.0864 is the high from just before the drop.
A daily close under 0.0690 would be the first below Sunday’s low, and 0.0673 and then 0.0601 would come next. A climb back above 0.0864 would erase the fall completely. The price was 0.0736 at 06:08 UTC.
The XPL flash crash leaves a token that ranks 122nd by market value on CoinGecko at about $349 million, and CoinGecko lists Binance, Upbit, OKX and Bybit among its busiest venues, with Binance carrying about $20 million of the 24-hour volume.
