Via dlnews.com
Bitcoin whale partially closes $114M short on Hyperliquid to dodge liquidation
An anonymous trader running 40x leverage trimmed roughly 250 BTC from a massive short position after Bitcoin's rising price pushed them dangerously close to getting wiped out.
Someone with wallet address 0xff84 on Hyperliquid, the decentralized perpetuals exchange, was staring down the barrel of a forced liquidation on a Bitcoin short position worth roughly $114.4 million. So they did what any rational person sitting on 40x leverage would do: they started cutting.
The trader closed approximately 250 BTC of the position across multiple transactions, eating a realized loss of about $33,400 in the process. That left a remaining short of around 1,543 BTC, valued at roughly $98.97 million, still live and still leveraged to the teeth.
Playing with fire at 40x
The position peaked at around 1,793 BTC, with an average entry price hovering between $63,999 and $64,000. At 40x leverage, a 2.5% adverse move wipes out the entire margin.
As Bitcoin’s spot price climbed in recent sessions, the liquidation threshold crept up to approximately $64,225. That’s a gap of just $225 from the entry price, or about 0.35%.
On-chain analytics firm Lookonchain, along with tracking service Hyperbot, flagged the activity as the trader began trimming the position to buy themselves breathing room. The partial close adjusted the liquidation price, giving the remaining $98.97 million short slightly more runway before an involuntary exit.
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The wallet first appeared around early August 2026, funded with roughly 2.44 million USDC. Its initial move was opening a short of approximately 1,600 BTC, worth about $102.6 million at the time. Since then, the trader has been actively managing position size, scaling in and out based on price swings and funding rate changes.
The short squeeze math
When large short positions get liquidated on-chain, the exchange’s liquidation engine buys Bitcoin to close the position. That buying pressure pushes the price higher, which can trigger liquidations on other short positions, which creates more buying pressure.
The remaining $98.97 million short from this single wallet represents meaningful fuel for exactly that kind of cascade. If Bitcoin’s price continues to grind higher and pushes through the $64,225 liquidation level, the forced closure of 1,543 BTC worth of shorts would inject substantial buying volume into a market that’s already trending upward.
The $33,400 loss the trader realized on the partial close might look modest relative to the position size. On a $114 million notional trade, it’s essentially a rounding error. But it signals something important: even whale-sized traders are being forced to play defense as Bitcoin’s price trends higher.