Onchain analysts flagged an alleged coordinated Fartcoin (FARTCOIN) manipulation attempt on Hyperliquid, resulting in $1.5 million in losses for the protocol’s liquidity vault.
Blockchain security firm PeckShield and onchain tracker Lookonchain identified the incident on April 9, linking four wallets to a single entity.
How the Alleged Fartcoin Manipulation Unfolded
According to PeckShield, the attacker accumulated a $15 million Fartcoin long position totaling 145.24 million tokens across four wallets.
The attacker then triggered what PeckShield described as a “suicide” liquidation in a low-liquidity environment. This forced Hyperliquid’s Auto-Deleveraging (ADL) mechanism to activate, pushing the toxic position onto the Hyperliquidity Provider (HLP) vault.
Lookonchain confirmed that the wallets suffered a combined $3.02 million in liquidation losses.
“A $3M loss on paper, but likely a massive net profit via cross-venue hedging,” the post added.
Meanwhile, two short-side traders with addresses beginning 0x06ce and 0x4196 were auto-deleveraged by the ADL system, realizing approximately $849,000 in combined profits.
“4 fresh wallets, same entity, all traced $USDC at the same time coordinated long-liquidated in under 3 hours after a 27% pump collapsed into a 30% crash. This is what whale-vs-whale manipulation looks like when both sides are playing the same game, and one of them blinks first,” Evening Trader Group wrote.
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The fallout comes as Fartcoin’s price sees notable volatility. The meme coin surged to an intraday high of $0.25 yesterday, marking its highest level since late January.
However, over the past 24 hours, the token dropped more than 13%, ranking as the top loser among the 300 largest cryptocurrencies on CoinGecko. The token was trading near $0.17 at the time of writing.