Hyperliquid JELLY ‘exploiter’ could be down $1M, says Arkham

The trader behind recent “suspicious market activity” on Hyperliquid that led to the freeze and delisting of the Jelly my Jelly (JELLY) memecoin is potentially down almost $1 million from their actions. 

Blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence said in a March 26 post to X that the trader attempted to manipulate the system to profit from price movements, withdrawing collateral before Hyperliquid’s liquidation system could catch up.

The trader opened three accounts within five minutes of each other, two with $2.15 million and $1.9 million long positions, and the third a $4.1 million short, to cancel out the long positions, according to Arkham in a post-mortem report. 

“This allowed him to build up leverage in an attempt to drain funds from Hyperliquid,” Arkham said.

When the price of Jelly pumped by over 400%, the $4 million short position entered liquidation, but the open short didn’t liquidate immediately because it was too large and instead passed to the Hyperliquidity Provider Vault (HLP), which is supposed to liquidate the position.

At the same time, the trader withdrew collateral from the other two accounts while having a “7-figure positive PnL to withdraw from,” Arkham said.

However, the “exploiter” quickly hit a wall when the accounts, which still had millions in unrealized profit and loss, were restricted to reduce-only orders, forcing them to sell the tokens in the first account on the market to recoup some of the funds.

Hyperliquid eventually closed the Jelly token market at a price of 0.0095, the same price as the trader’s short trade, which “zeroed out all floating PnL on the first two exploiter accounts.”

In total, Arkham says the trader withdrew $6.26 million, but at least $1 million is still in the accounts.

“Assuming he can withdraw this at some point in the future, his actions on Hyperliquid have cost him a total of $4,000. If he is unable to, he faces a loss of almost $1 million,” the blockchain analytics firm said.

Hyperliquid has since delisted perpetual futures tied to the JELLY token, citing evidence of suspicious market activity. 

Other traders have been using similar tactics 

This isn’t the first time Hyperliquid has had issues like this. On March 14, Hyperliquid increased margin requirements for traders after its liquidity pool lost millions of dollars during a massive Ether (ETH) liquidation.

Related: Bitget CEO slams Hyperliquid’s handling of “suspicious” incident involving JELLY token

A whale trader intentionally liquidated a roughly $200 million Ether long position on March 12, causing HLP to lose $4 million while unwinding the trade. 

Traders have also begun hunting whales on the platform, targeting prominent leveraged positions in a “democratized” attempt to liquidate them.

Magazine: What are native rollups? Full guide to Ethereum’s latest innovation