Machi Big Brother Sells 3 Mutant Apes at 1 ETH Each, an 85% Loss in Ethereum (ETH)

3 Mutant Apes Sold at 1 ETH Each

A 315 Ethereum (ETH) long on Hyperliquid, marked to an unrealized loss of about $27,900 and sitting less than 1% above its liquidation price, stands behind a string of sales recorded on Oct. 23. On-chain records show the wallet machibigbrother.eth, tied to Machi Big Brother (Jeff Huang), sold three Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs that day, each for exactly 1 ETH. Two had been held for three years: #5042 was bought at 6.13 ETH and #11697 at 7.5 ETH, a combined outlay of 13.63 ETH that brought back only 2 ETH, an 85% loss on the pair. Both sales settled on OpenSea through its smart contract, #5042 at 00:09 UTC and #11697 at 00:58 UTC, netting the seller 0.99 ETH per piece after a 0.01 ETH fee. A third ape, #2001, followed at 04:12 UTC at the same 1 ETH price. With the Ethereum (ETH) price near $2,359 on Saturday afternoon, each sale returned roughly $2,360. An on-chain tracking post published at 02:00 UTC on Oct. 23 flagged the sales, listing the original purchase prices and tallying the total loss at 11.28 Ethereum (ETH). The same record shows the wallet had already cut its ape holdings 2 to 3 months earlier, selling several Bored Apes at 8.3 to 10 ETH each, all confirmed on the Ethereum blockchain.

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The 315 ETH Long, 1% From Liquidation

The leveraged side of the ledger is where the risk now concentrates. Hyperliquid publishes account state through a public API, so the figures below are the platform's own records rather than third-party estimates. As of 09:35 UTC on Oct. 24, the machibigbrother.eth account showed a net value of about $21,700. The only open position was a single ETH long of 315 contracts at 25x leverage, a notional value of roughly $743,000, opened at an average price of $2,447.57. That entry sits above the market, so the position carried an unrealized loss of about $27,900 at the reading. Its liquidation price is $2,336.93, less than 1% below the roughly $2,359 quote from the same afternoon. A further drop of about $22 would close the entire position automatically, and the account's withdrawable balance stood at zero. The coin had slid to $2,371 in recent sessions after Nasdaq's worst day since June, which leaves little distance between the last quote and the forced-exit level.

The tracking post read the sales as fundraising for more trading on Hyperliquid and Papertrade, a perpetuals platform that launched on Oct. 10 with leverage of up to 1,000x. That motive is an inference: the post attached no record of the freshly sold Ethereum (ETH) moving onto either platform. Our own check of its arithmetic also found a gap. The post totals the loss across the apes at 11.28 ETH, but the buy and sell prices it lists work out to 11.63 ETH, a 0.35 ETH difference it does not explain. Earlier exits from the same collection are on the record, so the Mutant Ape sales extend a running reduction rather than open one.

The trade, as we read it, swaps slow-moving NFT exposure for one heavily leveraged directional bet on Ethereum. The 0.99 ETH per sale is small against a 315 ETH position, so the auction proceeds are not what keeps the long alive; the distance between the $2,447.57 entry and the $2,336.93 liquidation line is. Other large holders have been reducing Ethereum exposure outright: Arthur Hayes's 6,400 ETH Maelstrom exit and early-holder wallets selling 4,000 ETH both trimmed spot holdings, while this account doubles down through 25x leverage. Whether the $2,336.93 line holds is a question of short-term price action, the kind we follow in our Ethereum technical analysis. At the most recent reading, 09:35 UTC on Oct. 24, the long was still open, with liquidation about $22 below the market.