Shareholders on Wall Street and crypto traders online lost hundreds of billions of dollars last week, but at least one person got suspiciously lucky immediately after President Trump announced his new 100 percent tariff on the People’s Republic of China. One anonymous whale made just under $200 million by shorting key cryptocurrencies at precisely the right moment.
Observers of the decentralized assets were quick to notice the suspicious trades in the days that followed Mr. Trump’s tariff announcement, which contributed to Wall Street suffering its worst single-day drop since April. Bitcoin also saw massive losses, dropping more than eight percent in the last three days.
Friday — the day the tariffs were announced — was the worst liquidation day in the history of Bitcoin.
Mr. Trump announced his intention to levy 100 percent tariffs on Chinese goods just before 11 o’clock Friday morning. In the hour leading up to that Truth Social post, someone began shorting both Bitcoin and Ethereum.
In the subsequent hours, the trader made more than $90 million off of the Bitcoin shorts and more than $70 million off the Ethereum shorts. Those assets fell by more than seven percent and more than 12 percent, respectively, on Friday.
The trades were executed on the public crypto exchange Hyperliquid, where users can view other people’s trades, though their identities remain secret. The X account which first pointed out the crypto shorts, which is known simply as “MLM,” told followers to imagine what could be happening on other exchanges.
“This was just publicly on Hyperliquid,” the account, which posts about crypto and other investing news, wrote. “[I]magine what he did on CEXs or elsewhere. I’m pretty sure this guy played a huge role in what happened today.”
It’s not the first time that someone has made millions off of betting on Mr. Trump’s trade war policies. Back in April, the president announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs that were meant to retaliate against any country with which the United States had a trade deficit. Just days later, Mr. Trump backtracked, saying that the bond markets were worrying him.
Before he announced his delay in implementing the tariffs, someone started purchasing a suspiciously large volume of call options on U.S. stocks. In total, that whale saw a return of around 2,100 percent in only one hour. Even more suspicious was the fact that the call options were set to expire at the end of the day, meaning that they would have been worthless had the markets not so vigorously and positively responded to Mr. Trump’s tariff delay announcement.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill were quick to call for an investigation.
“Any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now. I’ve been hearing some interesting chatter on the floor,” Congresswoman Alexandrai Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X the day after Mr. Trump delayed the implementation of his import taxes. “Disclosure deadline is May 15th. We’re about to learn a few things.”
A duo of Democratic senators sent a letter to the White House that same day about the call options, asking if anyone in the president’s family or in his inner circle was trading before the policy change was announced.