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Trader profits $6.8M from BTC, ETH bets placed before Trump crypto reserve post
A crypto whale that placed hundreds of 50x leverage long position bets on Bitcoin and Ether before US President Donald Trump announced a Crypto Strategic Reserve has profited nearly $7 million from the trades.
The whale deposited $5.9 million in USD Coin (USDC) on decentralized derivatives exchange Hyperliquid on March 1 to place the long positions, according to crypto analytics platform HyperDash.
The whale placed their first Ether (ETH) long position on March 2 at 2:49 pm UTC. Thirty-five minutes later, Trump announced the Crypto Strategic Reserve — nearly immediately causing an explosion in market prices.
Around $4 million was used to create $200 million worth of positions with the 50x leverage. The whale’s Ether positions from Ethereum wallet address ”0xe4d…02c62” started closing 16 minutes after Trump’s announcement, with some speculating whether insider trading was involved.
The whale started closing several Ether long positions shortly after Trump’s announcement. Source: Source: HyperDash
The first Bitcoin (BTC) long position, however, was placed on March 1 at 10:44pm UTC, when Bitcoin was trading around $86,033. Many positions were then closed between $87,512 and $91,399.
Some of those Bitcoin exit positions came before Trump’s announcement.
Most of the whale’s positions have now been closed for a profit above $6.8 million, according to HyperDash.
Profit and loss position for crypto whale behind the”0xe4d…02c62” wallet address profit over the last 24 hours. Source: HyperDash
It should, however, be noted that Trump’s first post about the Crypto Strategic Reserve only confirmed XRP (XRP), Solana (SOL) and Cardano’s (ADA) inclusion.
Nearly two hours later, Trump confirmed that Bitcoin and Ether were not only included but would be at the “heart of the reserve.”
Between those two posts, Bitcoin and Ether’s prices were rising, but not to the same extent as the other tokens initially mentioned.
Insider trading? Pundits speculate
The 50x leverage meant that a 2% price fall in Bitcoin or Ether would have triggered liquidation, leading industry pundits to speculate whether insider trading was involved.
The founder and host of The Moon Show, Carl Moon, said: “This $200 million long on Bitcoin and Ethereum before the Bitcoin strategic reserve announcement, could be the biggest INSIDER TRADE I’ve ever seen.”
“Smells illegal.”
One X user suggested that the trader would have longed other tokens had they known about Trump’s incoming announcement, to which crypto researcher “FatMan” responded:
“I don’t know if it was an insider or not, but it’s also possible for an insider to know the tweet is coming but not know the exact contents of the tweet.”
Related: Bitcoin price metric hits ‘optimal DCA’ zone not seen since BTC traded in $50K to $70K range
The Crypto Strategic Reserve follows weeks of evaluation from the President’s newly formed Working Group on Digital Assets, led by executive director Bo Hines and David Sacks, the White House’s AI and crypto czar.
Trump is set to host the first White House Crypto Summit on March 7, inviting industry leaders to meet the Working Group’s Bo Hines and Trump’s AI and crypto czar David Sacks to discuss regulatory policies and stablecoin oversight, among other things.
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Onchain sleuth ZachXBT has flagged a suspicious transfer involving 3,520 Bitcoin (BTC) (valued at $330.7 million) that may indicate a major theft. The transaction, reported on April 28, saw funds moved from a potential victim’s wallet to the address bc1qcry…vz55g. Following the transfer, the stolen stash was quickly laundered through over six instant exchanges and swapped into privacy-focused cryptocurrency Monero (XMR). The large-scale conversion led to a sharp 50% spike in XMR’s price, with the token reaching an intraday high of $339, according to data from CoinMarketCap. At the time of writing, XMR has settled slightly but remains up 25% in the past 24 hours, trading at $289. When asked whether North Korea’s Lazarus Group was behind the attack, ZachXBT dismissed the theory, stating it was “highly probable it’s not,” suggesting independent hackers were responsible. Related: Kraken to end Monero support in European Economic Area In a recent comment to Cointelegraph, Chainalysis noted that most criminal transactions still rely on mainstream cryptocurrencies. “While there are concerns of more criminals moving to privacy coins for anonymity, the vast majority of criminal activity still uses mainstream cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and stablecoins,” Chainalysis said. The firm added that these assets remain attractive because they offer the same benefits to bad actors as they do to legitimate users — cross-border functionality, instant settlement, and high liquidity. Chainalysis noted that privacy coins pose limitations for criminals due to reduced liquidity and the fact that many major exchanges have delisted assets like Monero. “Cryptocurrency is only useful if you can buy and sell goods and services or cash out into fiat, and that is much more difficult with privacy coins, especially as many mainstream exchanges have offboarded the use of privacy coins, such as Monero,” they explained. The firm even said that blockchain transparency allows law enforcement to trace and recover illicit funds, regardless of the cryptocurrency used. In 2024, a leaked Chainalysis video suggested that Monero transactions could be traceable despite the privacy-preserving nature of the blockchain. The video reportedly showed how Chainalysis could track transactions back to 2021 via its own “malicious” Monero nodes. Related: The IRS offers a $625,000 bounty to anyone who can break Monero and Lightning Network The suspected laundering operation comes as Monero is gaining wider retail acceptance. Two Spar supermarket locations in Switzerland recently began accepting XMR for payments. The announcement, shared by Monero’s official X account, credits partnerships with DFX Swiss and OpenCryptoPay for enabling the integration. One user, posting on April 25, shared their experience of purchasing organic cacao using XMR at a Spar store in Kreuzlingen. In April 2025, Spar first tapped into the crypto market by introducing Bitcoin payments through the Lightning Network at outlets in Zug, Switzerland. Magazine: Bitcoin $100K hopes on ice, SBF’s mysterious prison move: Hodler’s Digest, April 20 – 26 Nike has been hit with a class-action lawsuit that accuses the sportswear giant of operating a rug pull for shuttering its non-fungible token (NFT) platform RTFKT in January. A group of RTFKT users led by Jagdeep Cheema claimed in the proposed class suit filed in a Brooklyn federal court on April 25 that they suffered “significant damages” as a result of Nike touting its sneaker-themed NFTs to gain investors, then shuttering the platform. The suit claimed the NFTs were unregistered securities, as Nike sold them without registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It accused the company of using “its iconic brand and marketing prowess to hype, promote, and prop up the unregistered securities that RTFKT sold.” “Because the Nike NFTs derived their value from the success of a given promoter and project — here, Nike and its marketing efforts — investors purchased this digital asset with the hope that its value would increase in the future as the project grows in popularity based on the Nike brand,” the lawsuit argued. The lawsuit asks for $5 million in damages, claiming Nike broke consumer protection laws and violated various state unfair trade and competition laws. A US court hasn’t definitively ruled on whether NFTs are securities. Still, in an April 9 letter to the SEC, marketplace OpenSea urged the regulator to exclude NFTs from federal securities laws, arguing they don’t meet the legal definition of a security. In its case against Nike, the class group said that the court doesn’t necessarily need to rule on the legal status of NFTs to address the complaint. In 2021, Nike acquired the NFT firm RTFKT Studios, which created virtual sneakers. According to the complaint, holders of the resulting Nike NFTs were told the tokens could be traded peer-to-peer on the secondary market and used to complete challenges and quests that could lead to rewards. Nike’s crypto kick NFT collection was changing hands for an average of 3.5 Ether (ETH), or around $8,000 when they were first listed on April 18, 2022, but were trading for around 0.009 Ether, or roughly $16 as of April 21, according to OpenSea. Nike shut down RTFKT in January, which the class suit claims decimated investors when “prices plunged and did not recover,” and also took away the chance to take part in the challenges and quests, which the group argued was a primary reason for purchasing the tokens. Related: RTFKT’s CloneX avatars reappear after issue blacks out NFTs The overall NFT market dropped sharply in the first quarter of 2025, with sales plunging 63% year-over-year, to $1.5 billion in total sales from January to March 2025, down from $4.1 billion during the same period in 2024. Nike did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Magazine: Financial nihilism in crypto is over — It’s time to dream big again Two Ethereum community members, Kevin Owocki and Devansh Mehta, proposed a dynamic fee structure for the Ethereum application layer to strike a balance between revenue generation for app builders and fairness in fee extraction. The April 27 proposal outlined a simple equation that uses a square root function that proportionally lowers the percentage of fees as the funding capital allocated to a particular project grows. Owocki and Mehta explained: “For smaller funding amounts, the fee follows a square root function (sqrt(1000 x N)), providing proportionally higher returns to make building mechanisms for smaller pools worthwhile. For example, if the funding pool is $170,000, then the root of 1000 x 170,000 equals $13,038.4 or 7% is taken as overhead.” The authors of the proposal added that fees would be capped at 1% once a particular application’s funding pool crossed the $10 million level, ensuring that small app builders can develop decentralized applications without excess fees while also encouraging project and funding growth by capping fees as developers scale their applications. Owocki and Mehta’s proposal to balance revenue generation and profitability among Ethereum’s app builders reflects the growing calls to reform fee structures and value accrual mechanisms to maintain Ethereum’s economic viability against competing networks. Related: Ethereum’s L2 approach equals many high-throughput chains — Avail exec In 2024, the Solana ecosystem onboarded more developers than the Ethereum network, attracting 7,625 new developers compared with Ethereum’s 6,456. Despite the surge in software developers building on the Solana network in 2024, Ethereum remains the dominant ecosystem for attracting developer talent, although the 2024 data shows that position is no longer uncontested. According to onchain analytics firm Santiment, Ethereum fees dropped to five-year lows in April 2025 due to low activity on the Ethereum base layer resulting from reduced demand for smart contract operations like decentralized finance. This reduced demand is leading to many institutions scaling back their Ether (ETH) holdings or selling off portions of their investment as investor sentiment toward the first-ever smart-contract platform continues to erode without any clear catalysts for a reversal. Magazine: Ethereum is destroying the competition in the $16.1T TradFi tokenization race Arthur Hayes, Murad’s Prediction For Meme Coins, AI & DeFi Coins For 2025 Expert Sees Bitcoin Dipping To $50K While Bullish Signs Persist 3 Voting Polls Show Why Ripple’s XRP Price Could Hit $10 Soon Aptos Leverages Chainlink To Enhance Scalability and Data Access Bitcoin Could Rally to $80,000 on the Eve of US Elections Crypto’s Big Trump Gamble Is Risky Institutional Investors Go All In on Crypto as 57% Plan to Boost Allocations as Bull Run Heats Up, Sygnum Survey Reveals The Future of Bitcoin: Scaling, Institutional Adoption, and Strategic Reserves with Rich Rines
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Monero accepted at Spar stores in Switzerland
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