🐳 Beluga Brief: Bitcoin Reaches New All-Time High

Doing his part to help the push through ATH, a crypto trader has opened a $1B long on BTC on 40x leverage. Will his bet pay off?

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Will McKinnon & Beluga
May 21, 2025

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Happy Bitcoin all-time-high day to all those who celebrate! After wicking to $109,850 we have officially broken the previous high made in January shortly before Trump’s inauguration. The combination of fear in equity markets and the rapid acquisition of Bitcoin by companies and even states has had a profound effect on Bitcoin’s price action, and it seems we are still at the start of this curve. Until this administration took office, it was virtually impossible for companies or municipal funds to own Bitcoin. Now it is not only legal, but the market is rewarding those who do buy BTC for their balance sheets with massive multiples on their stock price. In other words, virtually the whole world was offsides on this trade and now they have to rectify their errors.

24 Hour Heatmap, Source: CoinMarketCap

Throughout this pump, traders have been captivated by well-known crypto influencer James Wynn who has now officially opened Hyperliquid’s largest position ever. With a position size just over $1B on 40x leverage (and a liquidation price of ~$103,500), it’s pretty safe to say this is one of the more degenerate moves we’ve seen in the market in some time. Just over the span of the last 12 hours, the position has gone from up $12M to down over $20M and back up again… will James end up pulling off another magic trick, or will the market try to liquidate him? Only time will tell.

It may not be smart, but you can’t say he isn’t putting his money where his mouth is!

Beluga Starter Packs

Beluga is excited to offer two Starter Packs from our partners at Hemi, a leading Bitcoin L2, and BONK, the largest memecoin community on Solana. Head to the Beluga Starter Pack page to claim points and more!

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Will McKinnon is the Head of Content for Beluga and has spent every day for many years trading coins. For that reason there are too many to name, however his largest holdings by a significant margin are Ethereum and Bitcoin. NFA DYOR