Machi Big Brother: $12.25M to $21,000 on Hyperliquid, Then a New 25x Bet Minutes Later

At 02:22 UTC on Thursday 15 October 2026, the computers that run Hyperliquid, a crypto exchange, began selling ether that belonged to Jeffrey Huang. They sold 380 ETH at $2,379, then 270 at $2,374, then 200 at $2,355, then a last block of 800 at $2,331. It took a little over two minutes. When it was done, an account that had been worth about $12.25 million earlier in the month held $21,787.78, according to the blockchain tracker Lookonchain. Seven minutes later the same account was buying ether again.

Huang is better known online as Machi Big Brother. In the 1990s he was the eldest of the L.A. Boyz, a hip-hop trio of Taiwanese American teenagers from Southern California, with his brother Stanley Huang and their cousin Steven Lin, who became pop stars in Taiwan. He later founded the live-streaming app 17 Media and a string of crypto ventures, collected Bored Ape NFTs by the hundred, and in the past year became one of the most watched traders in crypto. Lookonchain says he turned about $56,000 into $12.25 million in four months. By the morning of 15 October almost all of it was gone.

How $12 million disappeared

The money did not vanish in one night. Hyperliquid's own records for the account show its value climbing from about $900,000 on 16 September to a peak of $12.65 million on 22 September, as ether rose from about $2,400 to about $2,800. It was back at $12.25 million on 4 October. Then ether slipped. On 7 and 8 October it fell from about $2,700 to about $2,400, a drop of roughly 11%, and the account fell from $12.2 million to about $900,000. On 14 October, as US inflation for September came in at 3.7% against a forecast of 3.6% and Bitcoin fell below $81,000, Huang closed about 4,000 ETH of his bet in small pieces to try to stay alive. The forced sales in the early hours of 15 October finished the job.

©CMZ chart. Data: Hyperliquid public account data

Arkham Intelligence, a blockchain analytics firm, put it most simply: an account worth $12.65 million three weeks earlier was left with $19,800 of margin after ether fell overnight from $2,500 to $2,300. Across all crypto exchanges about $811 million of leveraged bets were wiped out on 14 October alone, according to Bitget Research.

Most of what was lost was profit that had never been taken off the table. Hyperliquid's records show that, measured from mid-September to 17 October, the round trip from $900,000 to $12.65 million and back left the account with a net trading loss of about $695,000. Over a longer stretch the picture is worse. Since the account first traded in May 2025, Hyperliquid's own profit-and-loss figure for it stands at a net loss of about $36.7 million, on $15.8 billion of trading. The French site Cryptoast, using the explorer Hypurrscan, put it at $36.45 million.

What leverage and liquidation mean

Huang was not buying ether in the way a pension fund buys shares. He was trading perpetual futures, contracts that track the price of a coin and never expire, using leverage: borrowed money that lets a trader bet far more than the cash in the account. A "long" is a bet that the price will rise. At 25 times leverage, $1,000 of deposit controls $25,000 of ether.

The deposit is called margin. If the price moves against the trader far enough to eat through it, the exchange closes the position automatically. That is a liquidation. A stock broker in the same position makes a margin call and gives the client a chance to add cash. A crypto exchange's software does not ring; it sells. At 25x a fall of only about 4% can wipe out the margin entirely.

Hyperliquid runs on its own blockchain, a public ledger of every transaction, so its liquidations happen in the open. Its documentation says large positions are sold into the market in slices, 20% at a time with a 30-second pause, which is why Huang's ether went in four quick blocks rather than one. Any money left over stays with the trader. When the exchange's own liquidation fund has to take over a position, its profit goes to HLP, a pool funded by Hyperliquid users.

A public account

The same design explains why the world knows his balance to the cent. On a normal broker, a client's positions are private. On Hyperliquid, every account's positions, entry prices and liquidation prices can be read by anyone. Trackers such as Lookonchain, Hypurrscan, Hyperbot and Arkham watch famous wallets in real time and post the results on X. Huang's address, 0x020c...5872, is attributed to him by those trackers rather than by Hyperliquid itself, but he has traded under the name in public for years.

That openness cuts both ways. Followers copy big wallets, and other traders can see exactly where a large position will be forced to sell. Over the past year Huang's wallet has become a spectacle. Trackers counted 145 liquidations in the weeks after the crash of 10 October 2025 and 262 in January 2026 alone, and Lookonchain's running total passed 335, earning him the nickname "King of Liquidations". In September 2025 he had been sitting on an unrealised profit of about $44.8 million, according to on-chain data reported by DailyCoin and Stocktwits. By March 2026 Arkham put his realised losses over six months at $75.19 million, and by 30 June at $80.43 million since September 2025, as reported by The Defiant. To raise margin he sold 34 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, digital collectible pictures, in a month for 326 ETH, about $514,000, at a loss of about 399 ETH, Lookonchain reported. One ape bought for 76.84 ETH went for 7.65.

The comparison most often made is with James Wynn, another public Hyperliquid trader who lost about $100 million on the platform in 2025 and kept betting.

The questions that follow him

Huang's crypto career has drawn scrutiny before. In June 2022 the blockchain investigator ZachXBT published an article titled "22,000 ETH Embezzled and Over Ten Projects Failed: The Story of Machi Big Brother (Jeff Huang)". It alleged that two withdrawals of 11,000 ETH each were taken from the treasury of Formosa Financial, a crypto project Huang had been involved with, on 22 June 2018, and traced some of the funds to addresses it tied to Huang and Mithril, his social-media token project. It also accused him of a run of failed tokens and NFT projects.

Huang denied it. On 15 June 2023 he sued ZachXBT for defamation in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas. His complaint said he was "a mere outside adviser" to Formosa Financial who "never had control of any Formosa Financial funds", and argued that company insiders were the more likely explanation. ZachXBT called the suit "baseless" and "an attempt to chill free speech"; donors, including Binance's Changpeng Zhao and Tron's Justin Sun, gave more than $1 million to his legal defence in days. On 14 August 2023 the suit was dropped after ZachXBT amended the article, removing the embezzlement allegations and softening other claims, Decrypt and Blockworks reported. No court has found that Huang took any funds.

Back in, minutes later

At 02:31:27 UTC on 15 October, seven minutes after the last forced sale, the wallet opened a new long on ether. By 02:38 it held 290 ETH at 25x leverage, with a liquidation price of about $2,324, according to Hyperbot data reported by Odaily. At 09:48 UTC a transfer of 250,000 USDC, a dollar-pegged digital token, arrived in the account, and the position grew. By the end of the day it was 6,100 ETH, about $14 million of exposure.

Hyperliquid's records on the evening of 17 October showed the account worth about $271,000, holding a 3,400 ETH long, roughly $8.2 million of ether, at 25x leverage. Its entry price was $2,422. Ether was trading at about $2,417. The liquidation price was $2,385, about 1.3% below.