The risk of a large transaction does not always come from price speculation. A simple mistake can also lead to a billion-dollar mishap.

On May 19, 2026, the on-chain monitoring account Markets Alpha observed that mk4 initiated a nearly $100 million GOLD short position on Hyperliquid in about an hour. This position exceeded over half of the market's open interest, and he was still executing partial exits, already in a loss.

mk4 retweeted this message, writing in all caps: "SWEET MOTHER OF SATOSHI THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A REDUCE-ONLY ORDER."

He intended to reduce his position but ended up opening a new short.

This incident was quite fitting as an introduction to understanding mk4. He had around 12,000 followers on Twitter, where his daily content mostly consisted of memes, sarcasm, and bantering with other traders; however, on Hyperliquid, he managed a wallet holding over $30 million, with individual trade positions reaching tens of millions of dollars.

Hyperliquid OG User

In November 2023, Hyperliquid was far from being the on-chain derivatives exchange it is today. mk4 had already begun rallying followers to participate in a scoring system, showcasing his own score: 12,032 points, ranked 17th.

This was before the HYPE's TGE. Looking back on this post in January 2025, he added only one line: "study high conviction bets—hyperliquid." In his own narrative, early involvement in Hyperliquid was a high conviction bet.

This bet undoubtedly brought him substantial returns. mk4 received an airdrop of 719,966.4 HYPE tokens. On May 28, 2026, he sold 57,300 HYPE tokens for approximately $3.3 million. As of July 20, 2026, mk4 still held 276,000 HYPE tokens as exposure on HyperCore and HyperEVM, valued at around $16.6 million. If he had not sold a single token from the airdrop, at an assumed HYPE price of $60, the airdrop's value would be approximately $43.39 million.

mk4 later created a tool called t3rminal. It fetches new coin listing announcements from Twitter related to crypto, traditional finance, and centralized exchanges, filters out noise using AI, and then pushes the news and market movements almost real-time to Telegram. mk4 explained that sometimes he just wants to know what's happening in the market, without getting lost in memes and pointless arguments scrolling through his timeline.

This aligns with his trading scope. He trades BTC, ETH, SOL, HYPE, and also engages in TradFi assets such as gold, stocks, and commodities on Hyperliquid. In a July post, he was even monitoring whether stock contracts like SK Hynix could achieve higher daily volume on Hyperliquid compared to BTC.

mk4's own Twitter feed remains a highly noisy timeline. Lighter is the target of his long-standing banter with founder Vlad. He asked Vlad if he was just intentionally attracting hate to get attention, complained that the Lighter TGE made the entire timeline revolve around one topic, and even remarked that Lighter is probably the worst DEX for pair trading.

These words later collided with his most profitable trade.

Frequent Shorting with Profits Coming from Longs

As of July 16, 2026, mk4's total account funds are approximately $33.04 million, and the account has been active for 1057 days. Currently, mk4's account has only a few short trades, mainly holding short positions in AAVE, SOL, BTC, and PUMP.

On-chain data shows a total of 586 closed trades. We analyzed mk4's last 500 trades, covering the period from September 24, 2025, to July 16, 2026. Of these, 370 were shorts, accounting for 74%; only 130 were longs.

However, mk4's profits mainly come from long positions.

The recent 500 trades resulted in a total profit of approximately $7.03 million. Out of this, the profit from the 370 short trades was $0.877 million, while the majority of the profit came from the 130 long trades, around $6.157 million.

mk4's win rate is also not high. Out of 591 trades, only 212 were profitable, giving him a win rate of 36%.

His average position was around $1.58 million, with a median position of around $750,000; average holding time of 55.7 hours, with a median holding time of 27 hours. The average profit was about $124,000, and the average loss was about $45,000, with the former being 2.74 times the latter. The profit factor was 1.48, meaning the total amount of all profitable trades was 1.48 times the total amount of all losing trades.

This is a results structure based on surviving by odds. Most attempts will fail, but as long as a few winners are big enough, the account can still grow.

The concentration of returns also validates this. The top three most profitable trades by mk4 made around $10.65 million in total, equivalent to 151.4% of the net profit from the last 500 trades. Excluding these three trades, the total of the remaining 497 trades was actually in the negative. Just the largest long LIT position contributed to 71.6% of the net profit.

The most frequently traded assets by mk4 include ETH, SOL, BTC, ZEC, and HYPE. ETH appeared 56 times in the sample, SOL 39 times, BTC 36 times, ZEC 23 times, and HYPE 17 times.

There were a total of 72 trades in TradFi assets, with a combined loss of around $1.06 million. He did pay attention to traditional markets, but it seems he does not have an edge in TradFi.

Longing LIT: Lighter Shadow

The most profitable trade by mk4 was a long position in LIT. The notional position was around $6.3 million, with an average entry price of 1.2957, an average exit price of 2.3677, held for 54 days and 3 hours, ultimately realizing a profit of around $5.039 million.

Two days before opening the position, he wrote on X: "I guess I caught the bottom of LIT."

This time, he truly caught the bottom.

As the position entered the seventh week, LIT was still fluctuating. mk4 commented again: "$LIT only stopped going down when vlad stopped tweeting."

This jest continued his long-standing interest in Lighter. Even before the position was taken, he had been consistently evaluating Lighter's product, TGE, and the founder's social media presence. By the time the long LIT position was truly established, the daily dramas of the project community and on-chain position were put into the same time frame.

Based on Hyperliquid's 1-hour candlestick chart, within the calendar window covering this transaction, LIT rose from 1.2785 to 2.4416, an increase of approximately 91%; during the same period, BTC dropped from $77,533 to $64,563, a decrease of about 17%. The majority of this profit came from LIT's independent price movement.

The price did not rise continuously after the position was opened. LIT dropped to 1.0453 on the 8th day of holding, roughly 19% lower than mk4's average entry price; it was not until the 47th day of holding that the price surged to 2.76.

Several key news events successively impacted this position. One day before opening the position, L2BEAT completed the replication of the Lighter circuit, confirming that users could independently verify the emergency exit path. On the 41st day of holding, the market began to focus on the bullish outlook for LIT's fee buyback, platform trading volume growth, and product expansion; on the 47th day of holding, Lighter announced LIT's permanent burning mechanism, and Robinhood Wallet announced the integration of Lighter, further boosting market sentiment, with LIT's 24-hour trading volume increasing by approximately 172% that day. On the 51st day of holding, which was 5 days before closing the position, Lighter announced the burning of around 15.5 million LIT tokens.

mk4 closed the position after all these positive developments had materialized.

The 54-day holding period incurred approximately $171,000 in funding costs. Despite experiencing multiple price retracements, with the last one resulting in a roughly $630 million position, mk4 still turned it into a $5.04 million profit.

Swing ZEC

mk4's second and third largest profits came from ZEC, with completely opposite directions.

The first trade was a long position. With a nominal position of around $7.47 million, an average entry price of 418.4, an average exit price of 596.36, held for 5 days and 6 hours, realizing a profit of about $3.134 million. The day after closing the position, mk4 wrote in a reply: "$zec doing most of the lifting."

During these five days, ZEC rose from 413.14 to 595.79, an increase of approximately 44%; during the same period, BTC only rose by about 2.7%. mk4's average entry price was close to the low of the price window at 400.58, and the average exit price preserved most of the gains.

On the 3rd day of holding, Multicoin Capital disclosed a significant increase in their ZEC position, leveraging the transparent on-chain asset monitoring risk into an investment thesis for privacy assets. Subsequently, ZEC surged nearly 30% in a single day, resulting in the liquidation of approximately $62 million worth of short positions.

On the 5th day of holding, which was the day before mk4 closed his position, Zcash developers announced a quantum recoverable wallet and a post-quantum roadmap. Institutional accumulation, privacy narrative, and anti-quantum narrative converged over these five days, leading mk4 to benefit from the ensuing short squeeze.

If the story had ended there, mk4 would have appeared as a bull aligned with the ZEC narrative.

However, twenty days later, his tone on Twitter changed: "The bearish reason for ZEC is that this asset is too boring."

Five days after that tweet, mk4 established a short position of approximately $7.88 million in ZEC. With an average entry price of 614.61 and an average exit price of 420.58, he held the position for 4 days and 13 hours, earning around $2.474 million.

A market reversal occurred during this time. From June 3 to June 9, ZEC dropped from 609.84 to 448.53, reaching a high of 647.20 and plummeting to a low of 246.87 on June 5; BTC also experienced a roughly 6.3% decline during the same period.

On the 2nd day of holding, Arthur Hayes exited his entire ZEC position. On the 3rd day of holding, the market learned of a critical four-year-old vulnerability in the Orchard privacy pool. The vulnerability theoretically allowed attackers to create undetectable counterfeit ZEC, and even though a fix had been implemented, the market could not definitively prove it had never been exploited. ZEC tumbled from around $624 the previous day to about $309, inducing a sense of panic. If mk4 had closed his position at this point, he would have made nearly $5 million, but unfortunately, he did not.

On the 4th day of holding, developers proposed the Ironwood fix. By the 6th day of holding, which was the day mk4 closed his position, ZEC had rebounded by approximately 45% from its low. This short position faced an early exit by a whale on the second day after opening, a credibility crisis with the supply on the third day, and a solution proposal on the fourth day.

mk4 caught the brunt of the crash but exited after the rebound had already occurred, returning some profits to the market.

Within a month, he first made $3.13 million from the ZEC rally and then another $2.47 million from the subsequent drop.

These two trades better illustrate mk4's advantage than the 74% short position ratio. He entered the market with a clear bearish bias but remained flexible on specific assets. Traders easily fall in love with a judgment that has rewarded them in the past, but mk4 did not make this mistake with ZEC at least.

Trash Talk Trader

In early June 2026, mk4 mocked the market's frenzy to buy WLD, suggesting people seemed to think that buying the token would entitle them to an OpenAI airdrop. A week later, he established a short position of about $3.94 million on WLD, with an average entry price of 0.474.

The price did not align with this mockery. mk4 eventually closed at an average price of 0.5894, holding for 4 days and 13 hours, resulting in a loss of approximately $0.964 million. This was the largest single loss in the last 500 trades.

Five days before mk4 entered the position, Arthur Hayes liquidated his WLD holdings due to a significant pre-SpaceX listing price drop, causing the token to fall by about 10% after the news. However, WLD had already risen by around 70% in the previous month, and a single sell-off did not end the trend. During mk4's position, WLD rose from 0.45016 to 0.59707, an increase of about 33%, while BTC rose by about 7.7% during the same period.

On the 5th day of holding, the day of closure, the WLD contract sell side remained dominant, with many traders and mk4 positioned in the same direction. However, the spot buy side of WLD continued to absorb these sell orders, leading to a price rebound of over 16% in a single day, surging back to 0.4438 and approaching the resistance level of 0.6323; the crowded futures sell side ironically became the fuel for the rise.

The second-largest loss came from SOL. mk4 established a short position of about $12.78 million, holding the position for nearly nine days, with an average entry price of 84.599 and an average exit price of 88.685, resulting in a loss of approximately $0.618 million.

The day after the position was opened, SOL first dropped to 81.352, putting mk4 in a profitable position; the price then reversed and rose, reaching a high of 90.425 on the day of closure. Within the entire holding window, SOL rose by about 4.1%.

On the 8th day of holding, BTC broke $80,000, and funds began to rotate into higher-risk altcoins. On the 10th day of holding, which was also the day of closing the position, global stock markets hit new highs on expectations of a US-Iran ceasefire and positive corporate earnings reports; on the same day, Western Union announced the launch of a stablecoin on Solana, providing a bullish signal for SOL.

mk4 initially identified the short-term trend correctly but failed to take profits after a market reversal signal appeared on the 8th day.

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