Bitcoin (btc) slid to $75,500 on Sunday after on-chain data showed market maker Wintermute holding roughly $146 million in short positions across Hyperliquid.
Key Points:
- Bitcoin fell to $75,500 on Sunday after failing to hold above $77,000 through the weekend.
- On-chain data put Wintermute's Hyperliquid book at $13.85 million long against $146.19 million in shorts.
- Ether dropped 5% below $2,400 and XRP lost 6.5%, slipping under $1.50 after rejections near $1.70.
Wintermute Shorts Build As Bitcoin Slips
Analytics platform Onchain Lens flagged the moves over the weekend, reporting that Wintermute sent Bitcoin and Solana (sol) worth close to $60 million into Binance and Coinbase on Saturday. Deposits of that size on an exchange often precede selling. The same data put the firm's Hyperliquid book at $13.85 million long against $146.19 million in shorts, a lopsided tilt toward the bearish side of the trade.
A separate on-chain tally tracked 3,834.3 Bitcoin, worth about $256.8 million, moving from Wintermute wallets into Binance over the past week, a pace that dwarfs the weekend transfers on their own. Wintermute has not commented publicly on either the deposits or the futures positions.
Ether (eth) fell 5% to below $2,400 while XRP (xrp) dropped 6.5%, slipping under $1.50 after two rejections near $1.70 on Friday evening and Saturday morning. XRP had plunged 37% in minutes during that sell-off, when roughly $500 million in leveraged long positions were closed out across exchanges. Bitcoin has since recovered above $76,000.
Also Read: Sandbox Contains Exploit After Attacker Mints 14.9B SAND Tokens
Why Market Maker Positioning Matters
Analysts who examined Saturday's slide argued that crowded retail leverage caused most of the damage, noting that short interest actually fell while long positions were being forced out. Open interest across the wider derivatives market dropped by $3.34 billion during that episode.
Wintermute ranks among the largest liquidity providers in crypto, though its average daily trading volume has fallen from about $15 billion in 2025 to $10 billion this year.
Chief executive Evgeny Gaevoy disclosed those figures this month. The firm now plans to spend $1 billion on high-frequency trading and artificial intelligence data centers, a push well beyond the crypto desk that built it.
Bitcoin Rally Preceded The Weekend Reversal
The weekend reversal follows Bitcoin's strongest stretch in years, a climb from roughly $64,000 on Wednesday to just under $80,000 by Friday night, a gain of about 24% inside the week. Two policy shifts in Washington drove that run.
The U.S. Treasury doubled the size of its long-end bond buybacks, and President Donald Trump then urged Congress to advance crypto market structure legislation at a White House event. Roughly $3 billion in short positions were wiped out on Thursday alone, the largest single-day figure in exchange records that reach back to 2021. Saturday's crash reversed part of that, erasing $108 billion in market value over six minutes and catching 281,846 traders on both sides.
Read Next: Bitcoin Slides From $79.5K As RSI Hits Seven-Year Extreme
