Crypto Traders Are Hunting a $521 Million Bitcoin Whale—Here’s Why

A crypto whale has placed a massively leveraged bet that Bitcoin will continue to fall via decentralized exchange Hyperliquid. 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 an opportunity.

On Sunday, the whale first opened a short position on Bitcoin, and has since added over 300 additional short positions on the leading cryptocurrency, according to the HypurrScan block explorer. 

Bitcoin sat at $83,485 when the whale’s position was first opened, before falling to $82,466 nearly three hours later—which would have put this whale in significant profit. 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.

And it wasn’t. 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. Cbb0fe celebrated the price swing, but Bitcoin still needs to rise further for the short to be wiped out—particularly since the whale added funds to boost the liquidation price.

Decrypt reached out to Cbb0fe for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.

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.

Edited by Andrew Hayward