London-based Nickel Digital Asset Management (Nickel), a multi-manager digital assets hedge fund, saw its proprietary risk management system (RMS) undergo one of its most significant live stress tests during October’s flash crash.
October 2025 delivered the largest liquidation event in digital asset history, with approximately $20bn in leveraged positions wiped out — compared to around $2bn during the collapse of FTX.
The sudden, sharp sell-off followed President Trump’s threat of new tariffs on Chinese imports. As this happened outside opening hours of equity markets, crypto, as the market operating 24/7, came under global selling pressure driven by de-risking behaviour. Bitcoin fell 9%, Ethereum dropped 12%, UNI plunged 52%, and AAVE sank 66%.
Nickel Digital’s Diversified Alpha Fund — a multi-manager vehicle allocating to external pod managers specialising in non-directional strategies — saw its RMS monitor a ten-fold surge in trading activity as managers sought to capture dislocations.
More than $2bn in trades were executed through the platform in a single day as volatility spiked, triggering Nickel’s alerting systems. A cross-functional task force convened to reinforce systematic risk oversight, coordinate risk exposure with pod managers, and steward capital allocation during the drawdown.
According to data from BarclayHedge the Diversified Alpha Fund delivered a net return of +1.5% in October. Barclayhedge data also suggests the volatility of returns for the fund over the last 12 months has been around 6%.
