According to a fresh investigation by Santiment, retail investors, giving in to "fear of missing out" on Hyperliquid ($HYPE) price rally on October 30, gave four large wallets a perfect opportunity to fully close their positions, bagging $5 million in profit.

Wall Street legend Stan Druckenmiller's first ever appearance on X (former Twitter) with a post about Hyperliquid and the tokenization of trading was supposed to be a declaration of a new era for the popular DeFi exchange. It turned out to be a "sell the news" signal for $HYPE tokens' whales.

How to turn a tweet into $5 million dollars

The best example of 'cashing out' math was educated by the address "0xa2ce...3126". What was a constant accumulation since the end of May, at the peak of the pump, in the $94–$95 range for $HYPE token, became a methodical dump worth exactly $225,000 on the market every five minutes. All this was happening while the crowd bought up on the news. The result is a completely empty wallet and its owner locking in $2,395,168 gains.

This whale was not alone in his approach and as Santiment stresses, citing its own on-chain data, four top players opened short positions simultaneously and are now in profit. The only big buyer who believed in $HYPE price growth is losing more than 11%.

Trade log tracking $HYPE token liquidation by biggest holders after Stan Druckenmiller's endorsement on October 30, Source: Santiment / Score Arena

The token's price chart against USD only confirms a total exodus of big buyers at the time of writing. The Oct. 30 pump candle left a huge upper wick with a trace of those very five-minute sales. The $HYPE price has already slid more than 12% and is squeezed in the $81.79–$85 range. The local level of $84.150 has been broken from top to bottom, and now the token is slowly drifting to the next strong support at $78.020.

Traditional finance's 'big guns' like Druckenmiller undoubtedly remain the best marketing tool for crypto projects. The only difference is that for retail investors a billionaire’s tweet became a call to action, and for big capital an exit order.

The buyers’ rush created a perfect liquidity window for the whales — a chance to sell off huge volumes of coins without the price slipping down. What this makes of the story is that the technology and business of Hyperliquid turned out not to equal the price of decentralized exchange's native token.