An on-chain tracker reported that a wallet it attributed to Wintermute held $126.25 million in short positions on Hyperliquid on September 28, 2026. Ether was the largest disclosed position, and the tracked wallet showed a profit at that moment. But the figure is a venue-level snapshot, not a complete view of Wintermute’s exposure—and other reports from the same date gave a materially different total.
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The reported shorts and profits
The tracker listed a $46.92 million short in Ether (ETH), an $11.30 million short in Solana (SOL), and a $10.03 million short in Hyperliquid’s HYPE token among the largest positions. It put the open positions’ unrealized profit at approximately $963,600. The wallet’s reported lifetime profit and loss was $197.22 million, a separate cumulative figure—not profit earned on these open shorts alone.
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These are reported position values and profit figures for a wallet identified by the tracker as Wintermute-linked. They should not be read as independently confirmed totals for the firm’s entire portfolio.
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How the total compared with late August
On August 31, a report citing Onchain Lens put the wallet’s Hyperliquid shorts at about $149.2 million, alongside roughly $5.01 million in longs and $1.73 million in unrealized profit. Compared with that snapshot, the September 28 short total was about $23 million lower.
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The market backdrop had also changed. Bitcoin and Ether rose substantially from their mid-August lows and reached cycle highs on September 21 before easing back, according to a September 23 market review.
25 Wintermute’s own September 21 update described Ether and altcoins as having gained over the week.
27 The short positions therefore appeared amid a rally and subsequent pullback, not a continuous month-long decline.
Why reports disagree—and what the data cannot show
Some September 28 reports put the Hyperliquid shorts at about $93 million, with approximately $5.12 million in longs, rather than $126.25 million.
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6 The sources available here do not explain the gap, so the figures cannot be confidently reconciled. They may represent different snapshots or tracking scopes, but that remains uncertain.
Even the larger figure describes positions on one trading venue. On-chain data for a tracked wallet does not reveal Wintermute’s full inventory, positions on other platforms, or any offsetting hedges. A substantial short book on Hyperliquid may look bearish in isolation, but it does not establish that the firm was making an unhedged bet on falling crypto prices across its business.