The wallet known as “pension-usdt.eth” had been short ether for two months. On Thursday morning it was closed out after a surge across all major tokens, and lost nearly $24 million on the trade.
The address had been one of the more successful short sellers of the year, with roughly $49 million in profits from betting against crypto. Its recent record was a run of wins — nearly $6 million on a 60,000 ETH short closed in June, $3.6 million on a 1,400 BTC short in the same month, $1.7 million on another bitcoin short in March.
This single trade cost half of everything the wallet had made. Hyperliquid's records show the liquidation ran from 04:51:03 to 04:51:15, in five separate forced sales. First 9,989 ETH at $2,193, then 20,698 at $2,209, then 15,830 at $2,214, then 1,871 at $2,236.
By the end there were no buyers left for the last 1,417 ETH, so Hyperliquid absorbed it into a fund it keeps for exactly that purpose.
Ether rose $43 over those 12 seconds. The trader's own forced buying was part of what moved it, and every dollar it climbed made the remaining chunks more expensive to close.
The position was held for 1,445 hours, or a little over two months, through a stretch when bitcoin traded in a range below $65,000 and betting against it looked like the easy side. Wednesday's Treasury buyback announcement ended that, with ether surging up 18% in the past 24 horus and bitcoin zooming from $64,000 to nearly $70,000.
The account is now empty.
Hyperliquid's leaderboard shows the wallet, which trades under the display name ‘Penision Fund,’ holding just $35.61 and down 100% over 30 days, on $16.48 million of losses against $111.76 million of volume traded in that window.
It was not the largest casualty of the day, however. That was a $48.8 million bitcoin position, also on Hyperliquid, among $2.74 billion of shorts liquidated across the market in 24 hours, the largest wave of forced short closures in records going back to 2021.