Alleged Hyperliquid whale denies Trump ties, thanks CZ for doxing, and pitches market stabilization fund

It’s been a busy few days for Garrett Jin, the former crypto CEO alleged to have made a fortune with some well-timed bets on Hyperliquid last Friday.

Among other things, Jin has been accused, in a roundabout way, of having been privy to insider intelligence that informed his decision to short the prices of bitcoin and ether shortly before President Donald Trump’s new 100% tariffs on Chinese imports on Friday night. That trade resulted in a profit of more than $150 million and sparked suspicions of insider trading.

On Sunday, onchain sleuth Eye, or @eyeonchains on X, posted data linking Jin to the trade. Besides wallet addresses and other data, the long post included biographical information, featuring some of Jin’s academic and professional history. Among other things, Eye alleged that Jin, former CEO of defunct exchange BitForex, holds over $5 billion in bitcoin.

Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, commonly known as CZ and one of crypto’s most well-known figures, then retweeted Eye’s revealing post about Jin. In CZ’s post, which was viewed over 2 million times, the former Binance CEO said: “Not sure of validity. Hope someone can cross check.”

Early Monday, Jin took to X to hit back, denying claims he had access to privileged information and rebuking the Binance co-founder.

“Hi CZ, thanks for sharing my personal and private information. To clarify, I have no connection with the Trump family or Donald Trump Jr. — this isn’t insider trading,” he said.

While other onchain analysts have expressed doubt about Jin’s exact involvement, or whether he acted alone — crypto sleuth ZachXBT, for one, said “It seems more likely to be a friend of Jin” — the alleged whale hasn’t denied the claims. Somewhat cryptically, Jin, in his first post since the allegations were spread on X, said: “The fund isn’t mine — it’s my clients’. We run nodes and provide in-house insights for them.”

On Sunday, the Hyperliquid account being tied to Jin opened a new position, putting over $16 million into a 10x leveraged short bet on the price of Bitcoin, a trade with over $160 million notional value.

High leverage

With mostly likely more eyeballs on him and his fund than ever before, Jin also took the opportunity on Monday to weigh in on the recent market calamity while criticizing exchanges for offering traders excessive leverage.

“The deeper issue with the crypto industry is that exchanges offer high leverage on assets that lack intrinsic value — to meet user demand and boost profits,” he said. “But such high leverage only existed in the forex market, where underlying assets have value support, lower volatility, and liquidity provided by banks.”

Friday’s chaotic market conditions following Trump’s announced tariffs quickly included liquidations of at least $10 billion, already likely making it the largest liquidation event in crypto history, that then swelled to nearly $20 billion during the night. Some estimate the total liquidation figure could be as much as four times that amount.

Over 1.6 million crypto traders were liquidated on Friday, according to CoinGlass data. Jin had his thoughts on possible safeguards.

“If exchanges continue offering extreme leverage, they should at least implement a stabilization fund-like mechanism, similar to U.S. equities, to provide liquidity support during crises. Only this way will trust be restored, capital flow back in, and the market grow healthily,” he said.

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