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Machi doubles down on leveraged ETH longs as market bleeds out

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What wiped out $1.7 billion?

High-profile whale reloads on 25x ETH leverage despite racking up over $29.7 million in realized losses as majors slide and funding turns negative.

Summary

  • Machi sends another 210,000 USDC to HyperLiquid to scale an already aggressive ETH long.
  • His cumulative loss on this campaign now exceeds $29.7 million amid a broad crypto pullback.
  • The move comes as ETH trades around $1,978, BTC near $68,583 and funding flips mildly negative.

In the middle of a red day for majors, on-chain data shows Machi (machibigbrother) wiring an additional 210,000 USDC to the derivatives venue HyperLiquid, explicitly to expand a high-octane long position in ETH with maximum leverage up to 25x.

This is not a fresh thesis so much as an attempt to press a bruised conviction trade: as the market rolled over, Machi had already been forced to cut and close most of his earlier exposure, crystallizing more than $29.7 million in realized losses on this campaign alone. Yet rather than de-risk into weakness, he is stepping back into the same structure, in the same asset, with the same extreme gearing.

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The timing is stark. At the moment of the report, BTC trades around $68,583, down roughly 4%, while ETH changes hands near $1,978, off almost 4.9% on the day. Across the board, majors are under pressure: SOL slides more than 5%, LINK nearly 4.8%, with alt liquidity thin and correlations elevated. Derivatives metrics confirm stress under the surface, with the 8‑hour average funding rate on ETH marginally negative at about -0.0047%, a sign that perpetual traders are skewed short or at least no longer willing to pay up for long exposure.

At the same time, structural flows are turning against the complex. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw net outflows equivalent to 1,697 BTC, while Ethereum ETFs bled around 3,185 ETH, draining some of the passive bid that had previously supported dips. Network-wide, the liquidation tally over the last 24 hours reached roughly $354 million, with the bulk coming from overleveraged longs that were forced out as prices slid. Against that backdrop, Machi’s decision to reload on 25x ETH longs looks less like quiet accumulation and more like a public stress test of risk tolerance—one that will either be rewarded by a sharp mean-reversion bounce or remembered as a textbook case of throwing good money after bad into a structurally weak tape.

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Crypto World

DeFi Hacks Surge After $280M Drift Protocol Exploit

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Hackers, Hacks, DeFi

At least 12 DeFi protocols and crypto businesses have been attacked in just over two weeks since the $280 million Drift Protocol exploit on April 1.

Attacks aimed at crypto protocols or companies since the start of April include CoW Swap, Hyperbridge, Bybit, Dango, Silo Finance, BSC TMM, Aethir, MONA, Zerion and, most recently, Rhea Finance and the Grinex exchange. 

The Drift Protocol was hit with one of the largest exploits this year on April 1, losing around $280 million in a long-running social engineering attack suspected to involve North Korean-affiliated actors.

The attacks also come amid growing concerns this month that advancing AI models, such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and equivalent models, could eventually make it even easier for cyberattackers in the future.

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Rhea Finance exploited for $7.6 million

DeFi protocol Rhea Finance reported on Thursday that an attacker “leveraged a vulnerability in Rhea’s Margin Trading feature to execute a coordinated pool manipulation attack,” impacting the Rhea Lend smart contract. 

Hackers, Hacks, DeFi
Rhea Finance updates its users on the exploit. Source: Rhea Finance

Around $7.6 million was extracted, according to blockchain security firm CertiK. 

“The attacker created fake token contracts and added liquidity in fresh pools, likely misleading the oracle and validation layer,” it explained. 

Meanwhile, the Russia-linked Grinex exchange suspended operations after a $13.7 million hack on Thursday, blaming “unfriendly states” for the incursion. 

Related: Stablecoin issuer Circle faces lawsuit over $280M Drift Protocol hack

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Another attack this month was aimed at the Binance Smart Chain TMM/USDT liquidity pool, which suffered a reserve manipulation attack, resulting in the loss of around $1.67 million in early April, R3ACH Network analyst Jussy said on Thursday. 

It followed just days after bridge aggregator Dango lost $410,000 from a smart contract bug on April 13.

In the same month, lending protocol Silo Finance lost $392,000 on April 3 from a misconfigured oracle exploit and decentralized GPU cloud computing platform Aethir lost $423,000 in an access control exploit on April 9. 

DPRK ups AI social engineering attacks

The Drift Protocol and Zerion wallet exploits were two examples of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea-affiliated groups using AI and social engineering to infiltrate crypto companies to steal credentials and funds. 

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Malicious actors pilfered over $168.6 million in cryptocurrency from 34 DeFi protocols in the first quarter of 2026, according to data from DefiLlama.

Magazine: Forget stablecoin yield, how does the CLARITY Act treat DeFi?