This Billionaire Gambled on Memecoins (And The Rest Became Liquidation Lunch)

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Lookonchain, that stern on-chain librarian, has shone its unforgiving light upon Wynn’s antics, discovering not prudent stewardship of inherited land, but riotous, positively Gatsbyesque betting upon Bitcoin and a litter of memecoins—like so many degenerate pigeons cooing in the courtyard of digital finance—over the course of an astonishingly brief two months. 😏

Most audacious: a 40x leveraged long on Bitcoin, entered at the genteel price of $94,000. Now, perched atop $5.4 million in theoretical gains as BTC glides above $100K, Wynn sips digital champagne. Still, this is but the amuse-bouche; on PEPE, a $56 million master’s stroke yields nearly $24 million more—enough to purchase an oligarch’s superyacht or a decent weekend in Monaco. Lesser baubles such as TRUMP and FARTCOIN have furnished $10 million in loose change, while HYPE provided a pittance of $31,000—barely dinner at The Ritz for a gentleman of Wynn’s sensibilities. 💸

The crowd, of course, is divided. Some canonise Wynn as a digital-era Lloyd George; others mutter of rug pulls in 2024 and untidy low-cap promotions, suspecting Wynn of being less a trader and more the sort of “crypto influencer” one’s mother warned about—if only mother understood blockchains.

Elsewhere, faint sobbing can be heard from the crypts of the short sellers. Bitcoin and Ethereum have bounded past $100,000 like tipsy aristocrats after the hunt, inciting $879 million in short liquidations on a single, blood-red day in May. More than 125,000 traders (not a titled family among them) were wiped out in 24 hours, with those betting against ETH forced to retire to the country with their tail between their algorithmic legs. 😔

Yet the spirit of doom persists! One whale, presumably eager to lose weight, flung $17 million USDC at the markets to short with 3x leverage on Hyperliquid—he is down $1.2 million already, and Lookonchain, who cannot resist gossip, is keeping score.

Amid all this modern mayhem, Hyperliquid has donned the laurels of the DeFi arena, as reported most soberly by DeFiLlama. It processes $9.2 billion in daily volume, rules the perpetuals pit with a hefty 60% market share, and watches HYPE moon an improbable 80% in a month (though, like last season’s fashions, it’s still out from the year’s high).

And so, as risk-hunger stalks the halls once more and Hyperliquid corrals the punters, traders like Wynn become the poster children of DeFi’s foppish, feverish, and frequently ill-advised frontier—where fortunes are made, lost, and meme’d out of existence before noon. 🥂

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2025-05-11 02:52