Machi Big Brother racks up $8.7m loss on Hyperliquid trades

Jeffrey Huang, a Taiwanese music celebrity and high-profile digital asset investor mainly known as “Machi Big Brother,” has lost a whopping $8.7 million on his Hyperliquid account in less than two weeks.

Just 13 days ago, Machi Big Brother saw profits of approximately $44 million betting on the price appreciation of the Plasma (XPL) token. However, the price has seen major declines of up to 46%. Now the celebrity is sitting on an unrealized loss of almost $9 million on their 5x leveraged long position. The position has a liquidation threshold of $0.5366.

Machi Big Brother and other whales hold the trade

Huang continues to hold the trade, despite it having lost a significant amount of value. It has already cost him more than $115,000 in funding fees. He also has a 15x leveraged Ether long worth $1.2 million in funding costs, which has about $534,000 in unrealized profit, with a liquidation set at $3,836.

However, even after the losing position, Huang’s account is still profitable, with a total combined profit and loss of over $11.6 million.

The news comes a week after Huang sold his $25 million Hyperliquid position for a loss of $4.45 million on September 29. This was after BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes’ family office fund, Maelstrom, warned about the upcoming HYPE token unlocks. The token will face its “first true test”  on November 29, when the 24-month vesting schedule starts.

At the same time, other whales are also betting on the price recovery of the Plasma token. According to on-chain data, whale wallets have increased their XPL token holdings by over $1.16 million worth of net tokens over the past week across 226 wallets, while $3.83 million worth of XPL tokens have left exchanges during the same period.

For instance, Whale wallet “0xd80D” acquired $31 million worth of XPL tokens on Hyperliquid earlier on Wednesday. The whale now holds over $40.2 million worth of total XPL holdings.

XLP rise and fall

The initial enthusiasm of XPL can be explained by a powerful combination of factors. The launch of Plasma’s mainnet, a blockchain specialized in stablecoins, promising feeless transactions, was accompanied by a generous airdrop and direct integration with Tether, the sector’s giant.

This connection gave the project instant credibility, which drove up XPL’s price by more than 58% in the first hours. Analysts see it as an “asymmetric bet” on crypto’s most robust sector, with XPL serving as both utility and loyalty token within a Tether ecosystem reportedly targeting a huge valuation of $500 billion.

However, after the peak came the fall; in the past 24 hours, XPL’s price has dropped almost 3%, and it is now trading around $1.04. This is almost a 40% decline from its ATH. It’s not a surprise that this fix is harsh. It happens because airdrop winners are taking huge profits and because any new project, no matter how good, is naturally unstable. 

With XPL’s market value quickly rising to over $2 billion, putting it at number 51 in the world, a consolidation phase was expected. The sharp decline of XPL is also tied to the claims that Plasma “was developed by the same team as Blast,” a highly controversial project. 

Since its launch in late 2023, Blast has faced numerous incidents, including hacks, rug pulls, network outages, a lack of transparency in development, and heated debates over token distribution and airdrops. But, some analysts have affirmed that this was merely baseless, even organized FUD, spread to create artificial selling pressure. 

Still, more pressure is about to come. Plasma’s vesting schedule is set to unlock $90 million worth of XPL tokens on Oct. 25, threatening more selling pressure as the month’s third-largest token unlock by value.

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