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- A popular whale closed leveraged ETH and SUI positions early after sharp market shifts triggered large unrealized losses.
- High-leverage crypto trading remains risky, as even seasoned whales like Wynn face sudden portfolio setbacks.
If you think only small traders can slip when taking too aggressive positions, take a look at what James Wynn just experienced. On the Hyperliquid platform, Wynn is known as one of the big players or whales, who often makes other investors’ wallets nervous just because of one click of his position.
A Risky Bet That Didn’t Pay Off
According to The Data Nerd, on May 23, 2025, Wynn took a fairly bold step, or to be honest, a bit reckless. He opened two long positions at once: one in Ethereum (ETH) with 25x leverage worth $60.4 million and another in SUI with 10x leverage worth around $17 million. Looks tempting, right? But wait.
It only took less than 24 hours for the market to show its fangs. Both positions were forced to be closed early, leaving quite a deep wound in the whale’s portfolio.
From ETH, Wynn recorded a loss of around $3.69 million. While from SUI, the loss reached $1.59 million. Not only that, the market was also not friendly to high leverage at that time, so such positions were very vulnerable to negative sentiment.
Mixed Signals in the Whale Market
Interestingly, at almost the same time, there was also a big movement from another whale. Still on May 23, two large addresses were known to deposit ETH into Binance with a total of 4,241 ETH—approximately $11.26 million in value. This movement was quite obvious as a profit-taking action.
One of the two addresses is even estimated to have pocketed a profit of around $3.24 million, if sold at the price at that time, around $2,603 per ETH. His playing style is clearly different from Wynn, who tried his luck with large leverage.
Furthermore, in the past week, the market has actually shown signs of new interest in ETH. There is another whale that has accumulated $15 million worth of ETH, signaling that the accumulation trend is still alive. From on-chain data, there is a fairly strong ETH stacking pattern by big players, which means there is still confidence that ETH has a future, as long as you are patient.
And don’t forget the movement in SUI. The day before Wynn entered, on May 22, a whale was recorded opening a 10× long position in SUI with around 3.55 million tokens, or the equivalent of $14.46 million. This position even recorded a floating profit of around $264,000. So in comparison, Wynn’s action could be said to have come a bit late to the party.
On the other hand, after suffering huge losses in ETH and SUI, Wynn apparently didn’t want to give up. He even increased his long position in BTC to 11,070 BTC, using 40x leverage. The value? More than $1.18 billion. Although at that time his position recorded a floating loss of around $20 million, this decision showed that he still believed that Bitcoin could be a savior.
Just imagine if you were in Wynn’s position. Just lost over $5 million in a day, then immediately stepped on the gas again in BTC with higher leverage. Either mental steel or it’s too deep to back out.
