Recently, on the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, a long whale trader (wallet address starting with 0xf3) has attracted widespread attention from the community. Due to his high-leverage operations, the liquidation price of each of his trades is extremely close, but he has also made huge profits many times, so the community has nicknamed him the "insider guy".
Just yesterday (12th), the trader's series of operations once again caught the attention of the community. He went long on ETH with 50x leverage on Hyperliquid, and after initiating a "self-liquidation" operation, he still managed to make a profit of nearly $2 million. What happened?
Whale initiates liquidation
According to on-chain data analyst Ai Aunt's monitoring, this whale first opened a 50x leveraged long position on ETH yesterday (12th), with an initial entry price of $1,863.62 and a liquidation price of $1,677.1. The total position was 17,130 ETH, worth about $31.2 million, and he also deposited $3.485 million in USDC as margin.
Over the next few hours, he continued to operate, adding to his position and converting his BTC position to increase his margin, expanding his ETH long position to a peak of about 140,000 ETH, with a total value of $270 million, an entry price of around $1,900, and a liquidation price of $1,877, occupying 24.65% of the total ETH contract position on Hyperliquid.
Just when the community thought he would not further increase his long position, the whale made one last addition, pushing his ETH long position to over 170,000 ETH, with a position value exceeding $343 million.
However, shortly after this operation was initiated, the whale suddenly made a surprising move, withdrawing most of his principal and profits, quickly compressing his liquidation price, and ultimately resulting in the remaining approximately 160,000 ETH being liquidated. By choosing to self-liquidate, he also managed to quietly exit with a profit of about $1.85 million.
Hyperliquid loses $4 million
It is worth noting that after this whale made a messy trade and earned a profit of nearly $2 million, he left a mess for the market.
After he withdrew a large amount of his principal and profits, the liquidation price of his position was quickly raised, and the remaining tens of thousands of ETH were ultimately taken over by the Hyperliquid treasury (HLP) to complete the subsequent liquidation. However, due to the large size of this trade, the continuous drop in ETH during the liquidation process caused the Hyperliquid treasury to bear the cost, resulting in a total loss of about $4 million.
In response, Hyperliquid posted on the social platform X yesterday (12th) that the treasury's loss was not due to protocol vulnerabilities or hacker attacks, as some uninformed users had speculated, but rather due to the withdrawal operations of this whale:
Regarding comments and questions about the 0xf3f4 user's ETH long position:
It needs to be clarified that there was no protocol vulnerability or hacker attack.
The user had unrealized PNL and withdrew, which reduced their margin and subsequently got liquidated. The user ultimately made a profit of around $1.8 million. Hyperliquid lost around $4 million in the past 24 hours.
HLP's historical total PNL still stands at around $60 million. Just a reminder that HLP is not a risk-free strategy.
The maximum leverage will be updated to 40x for BTC and 25x for ETH to increase the maintenance margin requirement for larger positions. This will provide better buffer for the liquidation of larger positions.
How does the community view it?
Regarding this incident yesterday, many community members have expressed that the whale has brought a huge negative impact to the market. On the one hand, due to the whale's previous successful extreme operations, many investors have started to follow the whale's trades, and yesterday was when the US was about to release the latest CPI data, making the follow-up investors even more convinced that this "insider guy" could lead them to victory.
Unfortunately, the whale's operations led to huge market volatility in a short period of time, causing the follow-up traders to be liquidated one after another, paying the bill for the whale.
In addition, the Hyperliquid treasury (HLP) also lost nearly $4 million this time, and part of the Hyperliquid treasury's funds come from those who hope to obtain fixed income, who can deposit their funds into the Hyperliquid treasury, which will then distribute about 20% APY to these investors. This loss of Hyperliquid treasury funds will undoubtedly also harm the interests of these liquidity providers.
Finally, Blockbeats reminds investors that, based on this liquidation incident, whether it is following the whale or investing in DeFi products, there are certain risks, and investors still need to remain cautious.
