Tokenized crude oil futures saw their largest liquidation event on crypto venues as the conflict expanded to Saudi Arabia and Gulf oil production collapsed.
Updated Mar 9, 2026, 4: 59 a.m. Published Mar 9, 2026, 4: 54 a.m.
Crude oil just had its biggest day in history, and the traders shorting or taking bearish bets on it over the weekend paid the price.
Tokenized oil perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid recorded nearly $40 million in liquidations over the past 24 hours, per Coinglass, with $36.9 million of that coming from short positions that got obliterated as crude surged roughly 30% on a dramatic escalation of the Iran conflict.
The CL-USDC contract on Hyperliquid jumped to $114.77, up nearly 20% in 24 hours. The USOIL-USDH pair hit $135, up 9% on the day after already surging earlier in the week.
The oil move dwarfed everything else in commodities. Brent and WTI are trading at levels not seen since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the single-day percentage gain is on track to be the largest in the history of the oil market.
The catalyst was a weekend that went from bad to catastrophic. Iran appointed Mojtaba Khamenei as new supreme leader, replacing his father who was killed in the opening wave of strikes. Israel launched a fresh round of attacks on Iranian and Hezbollah infrastructure.
Iranian missiles and drones expanded beyond Israel to hit Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, killing two people near Riyadh and targeting energy infrastructure. Iraq’s oil output dropped roughly 60%. Kuwait and the UAE trimmed production as tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz collapsed.
Anyone shorting oil into that backdrop got carried out. The $36.9 million in short liquidations on the CL contract alone made oil one of the largest single-asset liquidation events on