James Wynn's $1B BTC Long

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Hyperliquid trader, JamesWynnReal, is now officially the first user to ever hold a position with a notional value larger than $1B on the platform. He started his position on Tuesday with a 40x BTC long position, which quickly grew to a size of 7,764 BTC. In just over 12 hours, he started to close out his position, selling 2,561 BTC to lock in a profit of $4.5M, while continuing to hold the remaining position riding on unrealized profits of more than $8M.

It is crucial to distinguish between notional value and actual capital deployed. In derivatives trading, 'notional value' represents the total worth of the assets controlled, not the cash in the wallet. With 40x leverage, controlling a $1.14 billion position requires roughly $28.5 million in collateral. This structure magnifies the stakes, as even a minor 2.5% adverse price move could result in a total loss of the principal investment.

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As BTC broke its all-time high, he continued to add to his position, building up to a trade size of 10,200 BTC. By this point, his position was worth $1.14B with an unrealized profit of $39M. As of this article, he has once again begun to close a portion of his long, but remains in the market with more than $27M in unrealized profit.

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The trader's approach of selling portions of the position over time, known as "scaling out," is a necessity for trades of this size rather than just a preference. Executing a market sell order for the full 10,000 BTC at once would likely trigger severe slippage—forcing the price down due to lack of immediate buy orders—which would drastically reduce the realized profit compared to the theoretical paper gains.