Top Traders Cut Longs to 9% on Hyperliquid, Lighter, dYdX and Pacifica

Longs Shed $72 Million

The top-performing traders on four decentralized perpetual venues cut their long exposure by roughly a fifth inside a single session. Position data aggregated across DeFi venues Hyperliquid, Lighter, dYdX and Pacifica shows the cohort's long share falling from 12% to about 9% of position value between a reading taken at 23:07 UTC on Monday and a snapshot at 08:20 UTC on Tuesday. The aggregate tracks the top 100 accounts by seven-day return on each exchange, counted separately and then summed asset by asset, with figures refreshed every hour. In dollar terms the move is uneven: longs shrank from about $396 million to $324 million, a drop of 18%, while shorts grew 2.6% to roughly $3.11 billion, leaving the book better than nine-to-one short by value. The deleveraging tracked a soft tape. Over the same window Bitcoin slipped from $80,107 to $79,712 and Ethereum drifted from $2,322 to $2,309, declines of 0.5% and 0.6% respectively; our live monitoring now puts Bitcoin near $79,900 and Ethereum near $2,320, so neither asset has extended the move since the snapshot was captured. The seven-day cohort is the strictest window the dataset covers, because its membership is re-selected every hour on realized weekly performance. An account that carries a long through a falling tape can drop out of the top 100 altogether, and its position then vanishes from the aggregate rather than flipping. Part of the morning-to-evening decline therefore reflects last week's winners standing down rather than the same accounts actively shorting. The dollar ledger still points one way: the long side carries $72 million less than it did nine hours earlier, and the short side absorbed $80 million more.

The 24-Hour Group Moved Long

The two other performance windows in the same dataset tell a split story. The 24-hour top-trader group, re-ranked daily, shifted the opposite way: longs rose $63 million to about $341 million while shorts fell $141 million to $2.39 billion, taking the short share from 90% to 88%. It was the only cohort of the three to move long, and it carried roughly $50 million in unrealized profit. The 30-day group barely budged, sitting at about 91% short by the evening reading with $341 million in longs against $3.40 billion in shorts, level with the morning's 90%. Coin by coin, the short skew is steepest in Ethereum: shorts hold $696 million of the 24-hour group's Ethereum book, 98% of its position value, against $873 million (97% short) in the seven-day cohort and $916 million (87%) in the 30-day window. Ethereum nonetheless carries the largest unrealized gains of any asset, between $17 million and $22 million in each window, and long accounts in the 24-hour group grew from 58 to 70 while short accounts fell from 133 to 119. Bitcoin runs short as well: 69 long accounts against 139 shorts in the 24-hour group, worth $76 million against $819 million; 68 against 180 in the seven-day group, 18 more short accounts than in the morning; and 77 against 170 in the 30-day group. The sharpest single-coin swing was Hyperliquid's HYPE. Its seven-day long share fell from 15% at the morning reading, a level reached after climbing from 6% on Monday evening, back to 6% by Tuesday, with long value down from $36 million to $14 million against $219 million in shorts. That $22 million reduction is close to a third of the cohort's entire long decline. HYPE also holds the dataset's largest unrealized losses, about $30 million in the seven-day window and $48 million in the 30-day window, while the token traded at $77.70, up 0.8% over 24 hours. In the 24-hour cohort HYPE leans the other way at 39% long, the highest long share among the top 20 assets by value. NEAR longs in the 24-hour group jumped from $1 million to $26 million on a single added account, and ZEC longs doubled from $25 million to $54 million.

Three Limits on the Data

Measurement caveats keep these numbers in proportion. The tally sums only the top 100 accounts per venue, so a few very large positions can move the value shares alone; the NEAR jump, where one added account multiplied long value twenty-five-fold, is the clearest case. Spot holdings and hedges on other venues are invisible to the count, so a short in the data can be a hedge rather than a directional bet. Anyone doing their own DYOR on positioning should also remember that the seven-day group is re-selected hourly, so the slide from 12% to 9% partly churns with the leaderboard itself. What the figures do measure cleanly is the distance between the two sides of the book: $324 million long against $3.11 billion short in the strictest cohort, a gap of nearly $2.8 billion, with no asset among the top 20 by value carrying more long than short in any of the three windows.