Whales Buying the Dip: $45M ETH Long Plus $25M in Spot Buys

The short version

Whales buying the dip: a Hyperliquid trader with 10 wins out of 10 opened a 25x long on 20,277 ETH, about $45 million, after Thursday’s sell-off.
A wallet tied to a 2015 Ethereum ICO buyer borrowed $5 million in USDC and swapped it for 2,221 ETH at $2,248.
A Bitcoin whale that sold 288 cbBTC after the Binance hack has bought back about 255, roughly $19.7 million, in two rounds.
Next: whether Ethereum holds $2,158 to $2,174, its 200-day average and last swing low. Follow Base Camp on X for the next big wallet move.

Somebody always buys the panic. This week, $1.24 billion in leveraged bets got flushed out, and the big wallets were waiting. Whales buying the dip is nothing new. What stands out this time is how differently three of them did it.

Here’s the quick run-down:

A Hyperliquid trader who has not lost a trade since September opened a 25x long on 20,277 ETH, about $45 million.
A wallet linked to a 2015 Ethereum ICO buyer swapped $5 million in borrowed USDC for 2,221 ETH at $2,248.
A Bitcoin whale who dumped its coins after the Binance hack has bought back about 255 cbBTC, roughly $19.7 million, in two rounds.

Ethereum trades at $2,235 at the time of writing, down 7.6% in 24 hours. Bitcoin sits at $76,006, down 5.3%.

Lookonchain spotted the biggest of the three:

Who Is the 25x ETH Long Whale?

It is a Hyperliquid account, 0xe813, with a perfect record. Lookonchain counts 10 winning trades and $6.32 million in realized profit. We checked its fills back to September 19 and found no losing close.

The new position went on between 21:26 and 23:11 UTC on Thursday, as Ethereum slid through $2,230. The average entry is $2,221.97, so the trade is about $240,000 in profit at the time of writing.

The “25x” sounds wild, but the account is not quite that stretched. The account holds about $4.6 million against the $45 million position, so the real leverage is closer to 10x, and Hyperliquid puts the liquidation price at $1,128. Ethereum would have to halve before this whale gets wiped out.

This ETH whale trades fast, too. On October 29 it opened and closed an ETH long five times in one day, buying between $2,253 and $2,310 and selling minutes to hours later. A perfect record over 10 trades is a hot streak, not proof of anything, so copying it blindly is how you end up holding the bag.

Ethereum ICO Whale Buys 2,221 ETH With Borrowed USDC

The second buyer is older money. Arkham tags wallet 0x7d61 to an investor who bought around 1 million ETH in the 2015 crowd sale, and on-chain analyst Ai Yi flagged the buy first.

Here’s what happened, step by step, between 18:46 and 18:58 UTC on Thursday:

The wallet turned 18,000 ETH into wstETH, Lido’s staked Ethereum, and moved it into its lending position.
It drew $5 million in USDC against that collateral.
It swapped the USDC for 2,221 ETH through 1inch, an average of $2,248.

So this is a leveraged buy, just a slow one. The wallet still holds 85,900 ETH on top of its staked coins, and Arkham counts more than 122,000 ETH across the whole entity, worth over $270 million.

SIDE TRAIL: Ethereum Whale Buys $63M of ETH Overnight, and Some of It Is Already Leaving Ethereum

Bitcoin Whale Rebuys the cbBTC It Panic-Sold

The third whale is trading Bitcoin, in the form of cbBTC, Coinbase’s wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum. On-chain tracker EmberCN noted that wallet 0xc79b sold 288 cbBTC at $77,592 after the Binance hack news on October 30.

It has been buying back since:

Thursday, 15:01 to 15:50 UTC: about 159 cbBTC for $12.4 million, an average near $77,800.
Friday, 04:31 to 05:15 UTC: another 96 cbBTC for $7.3 million, at about $75,800 and then $75,550, paid with $10 million it pulled out of Aave.

That leaves 299.7 cbBTC in the wallet, about $22.6 million. The catch: Thursday’s batch cost more than the coins it sold a week ago, and Bitcoin is still about $1,800 below that price.

Here is the backdrop all three were buying into:

Ethereum Price: Are the Whales Buying the Dip Too Early?

Ethereum price chart ETHUSDT daily on Binance near the 200-day MA at $2,158, with the ICO whale's $2,248 buy and $2,174 support — ETHUSDT Chart 1D Binance

Too early to say, but both ETH buys sit just above the line. The Ethereum price area to watch is $2,158 to $2,174, the 200-day moving average (MA) on Binance plus the last swing low. A daily close under it would put both ETH buyers underwater.

Above, the 50-day MA at $2,500 is the first real ceiling. Fear & Greed dropped from 50 to 28 in a day.

Bitcoin’s line in the sand is similar. Thursday’s close at $76,088 was the lowest since September 15, and the 200-day MA sits at $73,241. The cbBTC whale is now buying a little lower each round.

So the whales buying the dip made three different bets: perp leverage, borrowed stablecoins and plain spot. So far only the leveraged one is clearly in profit.

TRAIL MAP: Futures and Leverage Explained: Perps, Margin and How Liquidation Really Works

Bitcoin ETH Ethereum Hyperliquid On-chain Whales

Written by

Teddy

Teddy has been trading crypto since 2016. The focus is altcoins and EMA setups: finding coins sitting on key levels, waiting for support to hold or a range to be reclaimed, and trading the move from there. Bitcoin sets the tone, but the opportunities are usually in the alts.