Machi Big Brother Sells 3 Mutant Apes at 1 ETH Each, an 85% Loss in Ethereum (ETH)

3 Mutant Apes Sold at 1 $ETH Each

A 315 Ethereum ($ETH) long on Hyperliquid, marked to an unrealized loss of about $27,900 and sitting less than 1% above its liquidation price, stands behind a string of sales recorded on Oct. 23. On-chain records show the wallet machibigbrother.eth, tied to Machi Big Brother (Jeff Huang), sold three Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs that day, each for exactly 1 $ETH. Two had been held for three years: #5042 was bought at 6.13 $ETH and #11697 at 7.5 $ETH, a combined outlay of 13.63 $ETH that brought back only 2 $ETH, an 85% loss on the pair. Both sales settled on OpenSea through its smart contract, #5042 at 00:09 UTC and #11697 at 00:58 UTC, netting the seller 0.99 $ETH per piece after a 0.01 $ETH fee. A third ape, #2001, followed at 04:12 UTC at the same 1 $ETH price. With the Ethereum ($ETH) price near $2,359 on Saturday afternoon, each sale returned roughly $2,360. An on-chain tracking post published at 02:00 UTC on Oct. 23 flagged the sales, listing the original purchase prices and tallying the total loss at 11.28 Ethereum ($ETH). The same record shows the wallet had already cut its ape holdings 2 to 3 months earlier, selling several Bored Apes at 8.3 to 10 $ETH each, all confirmed on the Ethereum blockchain.

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The 315 $ETH Long, 1% From Liquidation

The leveraged side of the ledger is where the risk now concentrates. Hyperliquid publishes account state through a public API, so the figures below are the platform's own records rather than third-party estimates. As of 09:35 UTC on Oct. 24, the machibigbrother.eth account showed a net value of about $21,700. The only open position was a single $ETH long of 315 contracts at 25x leverage, a notional value of roughly $743,000, opened at an average price of $2,447.57. That entry sits above the market, so the position carried an unrealized loss of about $27,900 at the reading. Its liquidation price is $2,336.93, less than 1% below the roughly $2,359 quote from the same afternoon. A further drop of about $22 would close the entire position automatically, and the account's withdrawable balance stood at zero. The coin had slid to $2,371 in recent sessions after Nasdaq's worst day since June, which leaves little distance between the last quote and the forced-exit level.

The tracking post read the sales as fundraising for more trading on Hyperliquid and Papertrade, a perpetuals platform that launched on Oct. 10 with leverage of up to 1,000x. That motive is an inference: the post attached no record of the freshly sold Ethereum ($ETH) moving onto either platform. Our own check of its arithmetic also found a gap. The post totals the loss across the apes at 11.28 $ETH, but the buy and sell prices it lists work out to 11.63 $ETH, a 0.35 $ETH difference it does not explain. Earlier exits from the same collection are on the record, so the Mutant Ape sales extend a running reduction rather than open one.

The trade, as we read it, swaps slow-moving $NFT exposure for one heavily leveraged directional bet on Ethereum. The 0.99 $ETH per sale is small against a 315 $ETH position, so the auction proceeds are not what keeps the long alive; the distance between the $2,447.57 entry and the $2,336.93 liquidation line is. Other large holders have been reducing Ethereum exposure outright: Arthur Hayes's 6,400 $ETH Maelstrom exit and early-holder wallets selling 4,000 $ETH both trimmed spot holdings, while this account doubles down through 25x leverage. Whether the $2,336.93 line holds is a question of short-term price action, the kind we follow in our Ethereum technical analysis. At the most recent reading, 09:35 UTC on Oct. 24, the long was still open, with liquidation about $22 below the market.