This weekend, market watchers are fixated on a sizable whale on Hyperliquid who opened a $42 million long position on bitcoin using 40x leverage. It’s a high-wire act with no safety net, as a slip below $65,400 would trigger a full liquidation of the bet.
To kick off March, a derivatives trader on the decentralized perps exchange Hyperliquid planted an outsized bet that bitcoin will climb from here.
“A massive whale just entered a $42M BTC long using 40x leverage,” one X account wrote on Sunday. “High risk. High conviction. The market is about to get interesting.” These takes were splashed across X feeds all morning.
Interestingly, when social media lit up about the whale, BTC was hovering near $67,000 per coin. Since then, bitcoin slipped under $66,000, triggering a partial liquidation of this individual’s position. Many figured the trader was wagering on a swift rebound after reports of the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader. The bitcoin price rebound, however, never arrived fast enough to save the trade.
Once the liquidation “dust” cleared on Sunday afternoon, the position had been slashed to roughly $16.9 million in total value. The account’s equity (net value) now sits near $463,729, a sign that most of the capital behind those multi-million-dollar trades has evaporated. In plain terms, this high roller’s BTC long has been a painful lesson in leverage.
The trader also placed a solana (SOL) wager and is sitting on a modest profit of about $71,238, which barely dents the losses tied to the BTC position. Even so, the account remains in a highly precarious spot. Because the trader is using Cross Margin, the entire remaining balance of $463,729 (logged at 2 p.m. EST) is serving as collateral for both the BTC and SOL trades at the same time.
The current liquidation price is $65,394. With BTC trading at $66,237, a slide of roughly 1.2% would trigger yet another liquidation.
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