Four whales allegedly manipulated the price of XPL — the pre-market token of the Plasma Network — on decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, collectively netting around $48 million in profits on Wednesday.

Data from Spot on Chain flagged the manipulators’ wallet addresses on X, noting that the events marked “one of the wildest short squeezes and wealth redistributions” ever seen.

XPL soared 200% to a high of $1.80 within minutes after one particular address took a massive long position, essentially sweeping the order book and draining most liquidity.

Hyperliquid’s systems triggered auto-deleveraging once market liquidity proved insufficient for further liquidations.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

While some analysts initially attributed the wallet leading the effort as belonging to Tron founder Justin Sun, pseudonymous onchain sleuth MLM later identified the manipulator as pseudonymous trader TechnoRevenant.

MLM noted that the trader longed over 9.4 million XPL tokens worth around $5.7 million in 40 separate trades within about 15 minutes. Only 15 seconds later, he bought about 7.3 million XPL tokens worth $4.44 million, with the size of the orders suddenly increasing from about $44,000 to $444,000.

“Over the next two hours, a total of $159M was liquidated on the XPL pair across 1,026 users and 2,465 liquidations,” said MLM.

Hyperliquid said via its Telegram channel that it plans to introduce new safeguards, including integrating external exchange prices into the mark price, which is a reference for liquidations.