The "whales are short" headline is one-sixth a single wallet — and shorts paid yesterday
Yesterday in one line: BTC rose 1.1% (81,713 → 82,580) and squeezed the side everyone was talking about. $39.9M was liquidated on Hyperliquid, $26.2M of it shorts, two-thirds of the total. BTC shorts alone lost $23.1M; the largest single hit was 0x4b62…57ca, a $5.0M BTC short closed out near 83,064.
ETH added 0.5%, HYPE finished flat at 84.14, SOL slipped 0.4%. NEAR (+9.5%) and STRK (+31%) were the movers. Hyperliquid printed $6.17B of taker volume; open interest across the main perp markets stands at $11.84B.
What the timeline is saying: "Hyperliquid whales are net short"
The most-shared number yesterday came from Coinglass: whale positions on Hyperliquid total about $8.54B, with shorts at $4.58B (53.6%) versus longs at $3.96B. It ran on TokenPost, KuCoin and Pluang, and it reads like a bearish signal.
Two things the headline doesn't show:
1. A big slice of it is one wallet. 0x5b5d…c060 holds 18 positions, every one of them short, worth $791M: BTC, ETH, SOL, HYPE, XRP, PUMP, ZEC and more. That is about one-sixth of the $4.58B whale short figure. It is currently $43.8M underwater on the book (ETH short from 2,322 is −$19.1M, BTC short from 76,152 is −$18.8M), on $157.6M of account equity. Its liquidation prices are far away: ETH around 3,868, BTC around 137,000. And on our mark-to-market board it is up about $230M lifetime. This is a patient, well-capitalised hedge-style book, not a crowd of whales leaning bearish.
2. The money that actually traded leaned the other way. Taking only aggressive (taker) trades of $100K or more, and excluding market makers and liquidation backstops:
| Coin | Big taker buys | Big taker sells | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| BTC | $253.1M | $219.0M | +$34.1M |
| ETH | $67.5M | $60.9M | +$6.7M |
| SOL | $6.8M | $9.2M | −$2.4M |
| ZEC | $2.7M | $5.6M | −$2.9M |
| HYPE | $3.4M | $7.7M | −$4.3M |
Big BTC and ETH flow was net buying, while HYPE saw the most lopsided selling (−39% of its big-trade volume). Positioning says "short", but yesterday's flow and the liquidation tape both say the short side was the one getting squeezed.
Whale moves
The largest single-wallet moves on Oct 9 (net opens and closes, market makers and high-frequency bots excluded):
- 0xe02e…d78b opened a $28.8M ETH long in about seven minutes, average 2,505. Its liquidation sits around 2,370–2,380, about 5% below the current price.
- 0xf15d…ddf9 opened a $25.4M BTC short at an average of 83,068, close to the day's high.
- 0xc3ed…00dd closed $24.6M of BTC shorts around 82,069.
- 0x8853…8249 opened a $21.2M BTC long around 82,487.
The wallet worth watching most closely today is a different one. 0x020c…5872 is long 12,000 ETH ($29.9M) at 25x, entry 2,547.66, with about $1.06M of account equity behind it. Its liquidation price is 2,454, roughly 1.6% below where ETH trades now. This wallet has been buying every dip this week: it closed longs at a $1.56M loss on Oct 7 and a $5.4M loss on Oct 8, re-opened each time, and added another $7.9M yesterday. Lifetime, it is down $56.6M on our board.
On HYPE, the biggest position in view is 0x082e…ca88: 1.38M HYPE long ($116M), entered at 38.68 and up $62.7M. Its liquidation price is around 76.45, about 9% below the market.
The chart: where ETH longs would break
Each bar is the total position size of the wallets we track whose liquidation price sits at that level. Green bars below the line are longs that get liquidated if ETH falls there; red bars above are shorts that get liquidated if it rises. Within 5% below the price there is $76.0M of long liquidations, two wallets of about $30M each, stacked at 2,454 and 2,375. Within 5% above there is only $278K of shorts. The map is lopsided: the fuel on ETH is underneath.
Live version, with addresses and history: ETH liquidation map.
Levels to watch
ETH (≈2,494)
- 2,450–2,460: $29.9M long liquidation, one wallet (the 25x long above), about 1.7% down.
- 2,370–2,380: $28.6M, yesterday's fresh $28.8M long, about 5% down.
- Above: nothing meaningful until 2,660–2,670 ($15.2M of shorts, +6.7%).
BTC (≈82,650)
- Below: 80,000–80,500 ($11.1M, one wallet, −3.2%), then 78,000–78,500 ($28.6M, −5.6%).
- Above: 84,500–85,000 ($20.8M across three wallets, +2.2%), then the big one at 91,500–92,000: $65.6M, mostly a single $59.6M short, +10.7%.
- Within 5% either side the two are roughly balanced: $26.2M of longs below, $28.1M of shorts above.
HYPE (≈84.0)
- 76.00–76.50: $118.3M, almost all of it the $116M long above, about 9.5% down.
- Above: essentially no short liquidations within 10%.
Pages for each coin: BTC · ETH · HYPE. Click 🔔 on any wallet page to get a Telegram alert when that wallet moves.
Data: Hyperliquid on-chain fills and positions, compiled by CryptoAnimon. Prices and liquidation levels as of the morning of Oct 10 (UTC); the "yesterday" figures cover Oct 9 UTC.
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