On-chain investigator EyeOnChain has allegedly identified the mysterious Hyperliquid whale controlling over 100,000 BTC as Garrett Jin, former CEO of collapsed exchange BitForex, which conducted a suspected $56.5 million exit scam in February 2024.
The investigation traced the whale’s wallet addresses back to Jin through ENS domains ereignis.eth and garrettjin.eth, connecting funds withdrawn from exchanges like HTX and Binance seven to eight years ago to his tenure at Huobi and the BitForex collapse.
Jin, who graduated from Boston University in 2008 with a degree in economics, served as the CEO of BitForex from 2017 to 2020, before the exchange was accused of falsifying trading volumes and operating without registration in Japan.
BitForex froze withdrawals in February 2024 after approximately $57 million was withdrawn from hot wallets without explanation, with CEO Jason Luo resigning just days before the platform became inaccessible.
Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission issued fraud warnings as users lost access to their assets.
The whale recently sold over $4.23 billion in BTC to acquire ETH and opened a $735 million BTC short position on Hyperliquid, timing the trade just before President Trump’s tariff announcement that crashed markets.
EyeOnChain’s investigation revealed that Jin currently holds 46,295 BTC, valued at approximately $5.19 billion, across eight wallet addresses.
During August and September, he sold over 35,000 BTC for ETH using both spot and perpetual contracts via Hyperliquid, employing a series of BTC wallets that received over 570,000 ETH, which were subsequently deposited into Ethereum’s Beacon Deposit Contract for staking through his company, XHash.
The investigation identified that an ETH staking contract deployed by Jin’s linked address was initially funded by ereignis.eth on Binance Smart Chain.
The very first wallet to interact with the staking contract was ereignis.eth, which deposited 32 ETH.
Analysis of the wallet that opened the $735 million BTC short position revealed that it received funds for fees from an address that had deposited $4.1 million in USDC to a Binance deposit address shortly before.
The same Binance deposit address had received $7.54 million from another wallet that sent $40,000 in USDT to ereignis.eth exactly two weeks before the massive short position was opened.
The ENS name ereignis.eth, meaning “event” in German, has a second ENS name, garrettjin.eth, which directly leads to Jin’s X account.
Following EyeOnChain’s thread, Jin removed XHash from his profile bio and changed his profile picture, though he maintained the information on Telegram.
Jin founded XHash in 2024 as an institutional platform for non-custodial ETH staking, with EyeOnChain suggesting all staked ETH could have been used to onboard questionable funds from the BitForex collapse.
Between 2020 and 2023, Jin operated WaveLabs VC, launching projects including TanglePay and IotaBee, which shut down in 2024, and GroupFi, which remains active after receiving seed funding.
BitForex announced peak trading volumes of over $4.2 billion in January 2024 before the suspected exit scam began with large outflows from hot wallets totaling $56.5 million across Ethereum, Tron, Bitcoin, and stablecoins.
The wallet drains appeared controlled rather than hacked, which suggests internal complicity.
CEO Jason Luo resigned on January 31, 2024, with the first suspicious wallet transaction occurring on February 21 and the platform fully closing on February 23.
Following the shutdown, BitForex’s communication channels went silent, user complaints on platforms like Telegram were deleted, and community managers became inactive or changed identities.
In July 2024, BitForex announced that its team had been detained and was under investigation by the police in Jiangsu Province, China.
The exchange promised to reopen for KYC-based withdrawals but kept trading and deposits suspended before shutting down entirely.
The allegations come as Hyperliquid is frontrunning criticism of the industry regarding its lack of transparency.
Platform co-founder Jeff Yan accused centralized exchanges like Binance of underreporting user liquidations during last week’s market crash, claiming that some CEXs could be underreporting by as much as 100 times during liquidation bursts.
