While the market saw a resurgence, an undercurrent in the blockchain space had already surged to the surface. Machi Big Brother once again took center stage in the online discourse.
Over the past ten months, this crypto whale had been nearly swept under by every wave, with a track record of continuous losses akin to a heavy report card. However, in the unilateral market last week, with a $15,000 initial investment, he leveraged to roll out a $12.72 million long position within three days, making a whopping $12.5 million profit per trade and multiplying his principal by 84 times.
As of 6:00 p.m. on August 24th, the total assets in the Hyperliquid address under the account machibigbrother.eth stood at $10.07 million, backed by a $124 million long position. Like a delicate balance of leverage and position, this individual's ups and downs reflect the current market sentiment, liquidity battles, and risk appetite. On-chain data doesn't lie, encapsulating both the frenzy and composure within the holding numbers.
Current Position: $10 million Holding Up $13.3 million
Various analysts' views vary slightly. According to analyst Ember Data, Machi Big Brother has incurred a cumulative $35 million loss in longing ETH over the past 10 months, which has now narrowed to around $24 million after this profitable trade.
From real-time data on HypurrScan, one can clearly see his current position breakdown (data as of 6:00 p.m. on August 24, 2026):
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The total of the four positions amounts to $123.72 million, with an overall unrealized profit of around $1.435 million at current prices. However, a detailed look reveals that the positions in HYPE, BTC, and PUMP have fallen below breakeven, with only ETH still 2.9% above breakeven. The entire profit is actually supported by the ETH position (with an unrealized profit of around $2.36 million), while the other three positions together have an unrealized loss of $920,000.
In addition, to maintain these four long positions, he has already paid approximately $256,000 in funding fees—a holding cost for perpetual contracts that is deducted hourly regardless of market movement, with the longer the position held, the higher the cost.
The most crucial factor is the "liquidation price." Once the price drops to this point, the system will automatically sell his position without his consent to limit losses. Among the four positions, the tightest one is ETH at $2,229, about 10% away from the current price. One of his ETH positions already represents 59% of his total portfolio, setting the threshold for the entire account.
Converted into leverage ratio: With a principal of $9.44 million supporting a position of $123.72 million, the overall leverage is approximately 13.1x. This means that as long as ETH drops from $2,463 to $2,229, a $234 drop, his gains of $12.5 million over the past 3 days will be completely wiped out along with his initial investment.
Strategy Unchanged, Risks Persist
It is important to note that this time, Big Brother Ma's profits have all been accumulated through "compounding." Compounding refers to opening a leveraged position and not taking out the unrealized profits but using them as additional margin to support a larger position; as the price rises, the position expands, compounding in this manner.
Its mathematical feature is that gains are exponential when winning and a one-time loss when losing. Each time a position is added, it is built on top of the unrealized gains from the previous position. If the market turns against them, not only is the principal lost, but all the compounded profits are also lost simultaneously. Turning $150K into $11.15 million requires getting it right several times in a row; to turn $11.15 million back to $150K, theoretically, it only takes one mistake.
Last week, ETH's rebound from the bottom provided the ideal conditions for this structure: one-way, continuous, without looking back.
Although this operation has unrealized gains of $11 million for him, as the "on-chain liquidation champion," Big Brother Ma has encountered situations where substantial profits rapidly turned into huge losses multiple times. By mid-September 2025, the peak account value once approached $60 million (with unrealized gains exceeding $44–45 million). Subsequently, during the market crash on October 11, positions in XPL, ETH, and others were liquidated, transforming profits of around $15 million into losses exceeding $11 million, causing profits to evaporate quickly.
His trading style is characterized by high leverage (often 25x–40x), extreme bullishness, high win rate but a poor risk-reward ratio, and adding margin / averaging down instead of using stop-loss orders when facing losses, leading to a pattern of "small wins, big losses," frequent liquidations.
In November 2025, Lookonchain observed that he was liquidated 71 times within a single month on Hyperliquid, ranking first across the entire network.
Currently, the historical cumulative loss is still significant, and the issue of trading discipline has not fundamentally improved. On-chain data is publicly transparent, but highly volatile.
The Two Weeks of Ape-Slashing and Position-Rebuilding
One highlight of this story is the aura brought by the Whale Brother himself, while another highlight tells a story of a small capital holding a large position. But if we rewind two weeks, he was selling apes one by one:
On August 5, he sold BAYC #5670, exchanging for 9 ETH — the purchase cost over three years ago was 84.99 ETH, resulting in an 89.4% loss;
On August 13, he sold BAYC #5715, exchanging for 8.3 ETH, approximately $15,500; the initial cost was 34.17 ETH, around $64,600, resulting in a 75.7% loss.
This was his daily routine in the first half of August.
The fire sale of BAYC can be traced back to an earlier period. According to Lookonchain, he sold 34 BAYC at a loss in June, exchanging for approximately 326 ETH. However, the overall loss was about 399 ETH, mainly to add margin for high-leverage ETH longs on Hyperliquid, to avoid or delay liquidation. The community jokingly called this "surviving by selling monkeys."
At the time of writing, according to OpenSea data, he holds a total of 4,357 NFTs, but the NFTs are only worth $3.17 million, including holdings of 128 BAYC (around $2.5 million) and 102 MAYC (around $288,000). By comparison, at the peak, he heavily held three hundred BAYC.
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