Crypto Carnage: One Trader’s $8M Meltdown in Just 7 Days

Leverage giveth, and leverage taketh away—hard.

When Margin Calls Attack

Eight liquidations. One week. A seven-figure financial vanishing act. This isn't a cautionary tale—it's a masterclass in how not to trade during volatility. The trader rode multiple positions straight into the liquidation abyss, proving yet again that crypto markets eat overleveraged dreams for breakfast.

Blood in the Algorithmic Water

Exchanges love these guys—their liquidations become someone else's profits. While decentralized protocols executed the margin calls automatically, one can almost hear the market makers cheering from their yachts. (Funny how the house always wins, even without walls.)

Memo to future degens: Your 100x leverage isn't a strategy—it's a donation.

High-Risk, High-Reward, High-Loss

The journey that this trader went through on Hyperliquid has sparked debate about whether or not he might be an insider, as the analysis firm noted earlier this March. His long BTC & ETH positions, with 50x leverage, netted a profit of around $6.8M in a single day, right before Trump signed one of his executive orders.

Their investigation reveals continued high-risk, 50x Leveraged positions in ETH, which, after accounting for profits, resulted in over 160,000 ETH being liquidated — a burden that the liquidity provider, HLP, had to absorb.

As a result, Hyperliquid has since capped the maximum leverage possible for ETH to x25 to avoid this from happening again.

Seemingly unscathed, the risky bets continued, with the trader going short on Bitcoin. A dedicated “team” of people even tried to liquidate his positions, but the response to the margin call was quick. The user added $5M to support the trade, the prices fell further, resulting in a profit of $4.4M.

Lookonchain summarized that this trader made over $10M in each of two separate wallets and another with over $9M in profits. After covering any prior losses, the winnings total $4.79M.

But, as with everything, all good things come to an end. The traders’ new wallet did not fare well this time around, with six liquidations in the last few days, resulting in a total loss of approximately $10 million.

A Familiar Feeling

If the above story reminds you of someone, it’s not by coincidence. Known for even higher-stakes, higher-leverage plays, James Wynn is another trader who’s been under Lookonchain’s radar and whose journey we’ve also recapped.

Perhaps the most notable endeavor was his $1.25 billion long BTC position with 40x leverage, which at one point resulted in over $87 million in unrealized profits, before the news that President TRUMP would be imposing tariffs on the European Union.

His trading spree also ended in losses, but they were substantially exaggerated in that his unrealized PNL had reached almost nine figures before roundtripping it all.

The analytics firm notes, “It took him 70 days to go from 0 to $87M+ in profit, and only 5 days to lose almost all the $87M+ in profit.”