Whale Controlling 100,000 BTC on Hyperliquid Is Allegedly Ex-BitForex CEO
A crypto investigator claims to have uncovered the identity of the mysterious whale dominating Hyperliquid — and the trail, they say, leads back to a familiar name from one of crypto’s more notorious implosions.
According to on-chain researcher Eye, the trader controlling more than 100,000 BTC through the decentralized derivatives platform is none other than Garrett Jin, the former chief executive of BitForex, an platform that collapsed this year later than losing millions in customer funds.
In a post on X over the weekend, Eye shared screenshots tracing the whale’s main ETH Name Service (ENS) address, ereignis.eth, to another handle — garrettjin.eth — which is directly tied to Jin’s verified X account, @GarrettBullish. The word “Ereignis,” meaning “event” in German, has now become a shorthand reference among traders to the whale’s vast holdings.
Eye argued that the wallet’s activity lines up with Jin’s previous business links, showing transactions with staking contracts and addresses that received funds from platforms he’s known to have ties with, including Huobi (now HTX). More intriguingly, the wallet has also interacted with addresses associated with BitForex’s old infrastructure, and even with Binance deposit wallets that Eye says were used to open a $735 million BTC short earlier this month.
The claim — if true — connects one of crypto’s largest active traders to one of its most controversial past executives. Jin ran BitForex from 2017 to 2020, when the platform was accused of inflating trading volumes and operating in Japan without a license. In 2024, BitForex lost roughly $57 million from its hot wallets before freezing withdrawals and vanishing. Hong Kong regulators later warned that the platform was suspected of fraud, while reports surfaced that its remaining team had been detained in China.
Following BitForex’s implosion, Jin resurfaced with a series of ventures: WaveLabs VC in 2020, TanglePay in 2021, IotaBee in 2022, and GroupFi in 2023. Most have since gone silent. In ahead 2024, he launched XHash.com, a service targeting institutional ETH staking — a project that Eye and others allege may have been used to recycle tainted funds. Jin reportedly scrubbed references to XHash from his social media profiles later than the on-chain findings began circulating.
But not everyone is convinced by the connection. Crypto analyst Quinten François said the evidence looks “too neat.” In his view, the setup — with an ENS address that openly links to Jin’s verified social media — feels “way too simple to be true.”
“Why would someone involved in questionable trading leave a breadcrumb trail from an .eth domain to their public X handle?” François asked, calling the scenario “almost designed to mislead investigators.”
Hyperliquid, meanwhile, has become one of the quickest-growing platforms for perpetual futures trading on-chain. Its rise has been fueled by traders looking for deep liquidity without centralized intermediaries — the kind of environment where a whale with access to billions could thrive unnoticed.
Eye’s analysis claims the wallet connected to Jin rotated tens of thousands of BTC into ether positions and opened billion-dollar directional bets throughout September and ahead October, often timed around market volatility spikes. These movements, if verified, would place the wallet among the most influential players currently active in decentralized derivatives.
The allegations add another twist to the BitForex saga, underscoring how opaque the line can be between old-guard platform figures and new decentralized power brokers.
For now, the identity of the Hyperliquid whale remains a matter of conjecture — a mix of digital fingerprints, wallet graphs, and circumstantial clues. Whether it’s Garrett Jin or an elaborate impersonation, the wallet known as ereignis.eth has once again reminded crypto traders of an old reality: in a market built on transparency, the largegest players still move in shadows.
