What if a clearing-house outage triggers a market-wide flash crash?
A clearing-house/exchange outage is an acute liquidity-vacuum crash: price discovery breaks, vol-target books delever into a one-sided tape, and crypto (where 24/7 venues amplify) leads with BTC/ETH/MSTR down hard alongside Nasdaq. Rhymes with the 2010 Flash Crash and the 2021 Robinhood/Archegos plumbing scares. Forward angle: crypto market structure has no circuit breakers and concentrated exchange/stablecoin chokepoints, so the digital leg can gap further and faster than regulated equity venues.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. An exchange or clearing-house outage causes a market-wide flash crash. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Volatility (VIX) ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ · Crypto confidence ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.