Trader Linked to Whale now down $128 million after ETH wipeout

Onchain analytics firm Bubblemaps says a Hyperliquid whale linked to former BitForex CEO Garrett Jin and the infamous 10 10 short trade would have been up more than $70 million if he had never traded Ethereum, but is instead sitting on roughly $128 million in net losses after catastrophic ETH longs erased huge prior gains.

In a new onchain breakdown shared on X, Bubblemaps reconstructs the PnL of the wallet cluster it associates with Garrett Jin, arguing that if the trader had simply held BTC and avoided the ETH leverage spiral, his net profit would stand north of $70 million; instead, the account is now “down $128M overall” after a brutal series of Ether trades.

The cluster has been in the spotlight since the so called 10/10 crash on October 10, 2025, when a Hyperliquid whale built massive short exposure into Bitcoin and Ethereum shortly before President Donald Trump announced 100 percent tariffs on Chinese imports, triggering a violent risk off move.

How did a 10 10 legend flip from +$70M to –$128M?

Binance Square’s retrospective on the “10 11 flash crash” notes that the whale held more than 100,000 BTC equivalent and was behind a $735 million BTC short on Hyperliquid, with Arkham Intelligence later estimating between $190 million and $200 million in profit on those shorts across BTC and ETH as prices cratered.

Yahoo Finance separately described the same trader as the “Hyperliquid whale who made nearly $200M on the Oct. 10 crash,” and reported that blockchain sleuths linked the address to Garrett Jin, though Jin denied owning the wallet while acknowledging that he knew the person behind it.

From there, the trade morphs into a case study in overconfidence.

Binance coverage of a March 2025 liquidation recounts how an address on Hyperliquid opened a more than $200 million long position on ETH using 50x leverage, staking about $4.3 million in USDC to control 113,000 ETH before being liquidated in a move that left the protocol itself with a roughly $4 million loss due to insurance fund slippage.

Panoptic’s market intelligence notes and other whale tracking reports suggest that similar oversized ETH longs followed, taking the wallet’s aggregate realized loss on ETH north of $200 million as repeated attempts to time reversals ran into continued volatility and margin calls.

Against that backdrop, Bubblemaps’ claim that the trader swung from a hypothetical +$70 million to –$128 million net is entirely plausible: the original 10 10 BTC short win was massive, but the later ETH leverage series appears to have more than erased it.

What is the 10 10 whale doing now on Hyperliquid?

Despite the drawdown, the same cluster is back on Hyperliquid with a familiar mix of high conviction bets.

Bubblemaps says a connected address has recently deposited several million dollars of collateral to the perpetuals exchange, bought approximately $10 million worth of HYPE, the platform’s native token, and opened a $38 million short position on privacy coin Zcash (ZEC).

That dovetails with other recent whale tracking reports.

Bitcoin.com News described how a trader dubbed “Evaded” accrued about $7.5 million in profit in under four days from leveraged longs on ZEC and HYPE on Hyperliquid, then rolled into a $38.63 million ETH long using 25x leverage, a position that would be automatically liquidated on a roughly 4 percent adverse move.

Whale Alert and PANews have documented the same address pattern closing profitable HYPE, ZEC and ETH longs for about $4.6 million in gains, then opening a 990 BTC short worth nearly $75 million on Hyperliquid as BTC came under pressure from ETF outflows and derivatives liquidations.

While those reports focus on a pseudonymous trader called Evaded, Bubblemaps’ new thread argues that at least one of these high frequency, high notional Hyperliquid whales can be tied through address clustering and historical flows back to the 10 10 short and the entity it links to Garrett Jin.

The picture that emerges is of a trader who oscillates between periods of spectacular success and ruinous overreach, with the core pattern unchanged: concentrated directional bets on BTC and ETH around macro events, and now similarly aggressive positioning in platform tokens like HYPE and high beta names such as ZEC.

Why this whale matters for markets

On an absolute scale, a net PnL of –$128 million is a rounding error in a multi trillion dollar crypto market, but the 10 10 whale saga is a vivid illustration of how even elite operators with accurate reads on one regime can blow up when they assume the same playbook will work forever.

It also underscores how much of the Hyperliquid and perps venue narrative is driven by a handful of very large accounts whose wins and losses can distort funding rates, liquidity and sentiment for the rest of the market in the short term, especially when they pivot from being the bid to being the offer on assets like BTC, ETH, HYPE or ZEC.

For traders watching flows, Bubblemaps’ work adds another lens: rather than treating each new whale as an isolated story, it invites you to look at the entire career arc of a wallet cluster, and to ask whether you are front running a disciplined asymmetric player or shadowing a gambler who just torched nearly nine figures trying to replay last cycle’s script.