tl;dr
A crypto whale has placed a $521 million leveraged bet against Bitcoin on the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid. The whale's position is at 40x leverage, and a group of traders is aiming to liquidate it by pushing Bitcoin's price up just 1.75%. The whale has opened multiple short positions on Bitco...
A crypto whale has placed a $521 million leveraged bet against Bitcoin on the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid. The whale's position is at 40x leverage, and a group of traders is aiming to liquidate it by pushing Bitcoin's price up just 1.75%. The whale has opened multiple short positions on Bitcoin, with a pseudonymous trader organizing a $10 million attack to raise the price. Despite a temporary profit, the whale did not close the position, and Bitcoin's price rose over 2%, reaching $84,298.
Hyperliquid, known for its high leverage trades, is facing potential losses as the whale's bet fluctuates. The same trader previously caused a $4 million loss for Hyperliquid with a leveraged bet on Ethereum, leading to a reduction in maximum leverage levels on both Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The wallet’s current short position is worth approximately $521 million, with 40x leverage applied. If Bitcoin rises just 1.75% from its current price of $84,108 to $85,591, then the whale’s entire position will be liquidated—and there’s a group of crypto traders gunning to make that happen.
Bitcoin’s price has dropped about 23% from its all-time high of $108,786 achieved in January, according to CoinGecko, amid macroeconomic uncertainty caused in part by President Trump's trade wars and approach to geopolitics. Amid this recent decline, the aforementioned crypto whale apparently saw this as an opportunity.
The whale first opened a short position on Bitcoin and has since added over 300 additional short positions on the leading cryptocurrency. Bitcoin sat at $83,485 when the whale’s position was first opened, before falling to $82,466 nearly three hours later. As this was happening, however, pseudonymous trader Cbb0fe noticed what was going on and made it their mission to liquidate the whale.
Cbb0fe claims to have organized a group attack to deploy over $10 million worth of capital to attempt to raise the price of Bitcoin. As the leading cryptocurrency’s price fell, the trader took to X (formerly Twitter) to claim that the war wasn’t over. The whale didn’t close the short while in profit, and Bitcoin climbed over 2% to $84,298 over a four-hour period, according to TradingView.
Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetuals exchange that utilizes its own layer-1 blockchain to process transactions. The platform allows users to place leverage trades of up to 40x, according to Hyperliquid docs; if cross positions are liquidated, then users' other cross positions could be liquidated to help cover losses.
While the whale is playing with extremely high stakes, the owner is currently in $4.9 million worth of profit over the past 30 days, according to HypurrScan. At the time of writing, the whale’s Bitcoin short position is sitting at an unrealized loss of $630,000. But this figure is changing every second due to Bitcoin’s volatile nature, combined with the whale’s make-or-break leveraged bet.
The same trader caused a $4 million loss for Hyperliquid last week over a $285 million leveraged bet on Ethereum. Hyperliquid lowered its maximum leverage levels on both Bitcoin and Ethereum following that 50x ETH bet, which resulted in the community-owned Hyperliquidity Provider (HLP) covering the losses.