Someone has taken a 23,000 bitcoin short bet on Bitfinex, worth $729 million at the current price, with 15,157 bitcoin apparently borrowed.
The shorting began at eight o’clock UTC, so as Europe was waking up this Friday, with it gradually rising all day from about 2,000 shorted bitcoin to 26,400 at one point before some of it is closed.
We can see above the gradual but relentless rise in shorts throughout yesterday being mirrored in a pretty much identical gradual and relentless fall in bitcoin’s price from above $34,000 to about $30,000.
The 25th of June was the last Friday of the month with CME futures expiring as well as options on Deribit and other platforms.
These are apparently unhedged shorts, although it’s not clear whether the above data from Datamish is limited to Bitfinex, in which case we wouldn’t know whether they are hedged somewhere else or otherwise.
But what is more interesting is if we zoom out a bit to see a pretty big zig zag of close to one billion dollars.
Bitcoin shorts jumped 10x earlier this month, but price went against the shorter/s, reaching $41,500 on the 15th of June.
It then falls to $38,000 on the 18th of June when the shorters start closing as price drops to $29,000 on the 22nd, while shorts fall from 25,000 bitcoins to 3,000.
Bitcoin then rises to reach $35,000 on the 25th, when Musk sends out a bitcoin tweet at 4:10 am euro time, which may have contributed to these shorts opening when europe woke up.
It remains to be seen now when these shorts close with it unclear whether there’s a lag between these shorts opening and Bitfinex reporting and just how much of a lag as our suspicion based on previous events suggests it may lag by four or five days, but of course it may have changed.
In addition Bitfinex does not quite have AML and KYC, so this billionaire might feel comfortable, but of course we do not know if it is one person.
Yet they probably made quite a bit of money with it to be seen now if they get hunted with longs up too to 50,000 bitcoin, but they rose gradually rather than in a massive jump.
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