A significant case of market manipulation involving the Plasma (XPL) token occurred on the cryptocurrency platform Hyperliquid, resulting in a sharp price spike and substantial losses for traders.
This is reported by Business • Media
Details of the Market Manipulation
On the morning of August 27, an unknown trader with wallet 0xb9 executed a powerful operation in the XPL market. They opened a massive long position that nearly cleared the order book and forced all traders with short positions out.
On August 27, whale 0xb9 opened a long position in XPL on Hyperliquid, liquidating almost all short positions
As a result of this operation, the price of XPL instantly surged from $0.6 to $1.8, representing an increase of over 200%. The daily liquidation volume for this position reached $17.16 million.
Financial Results of the Manipulation
A group of large holders made approximately $46.1 million from this operation. The wallet 0xb9 directly earned a net profit of about $16 million in just a few minutes.
Interestingly, some users associate this address with Justin Sun, the founder of the TRON project; however, there is no direct evidence of this. Suspicion arose because five years ago, an Ethereum transfer was made to an address linked to him.
As of the time of publication, wallet 0xb9 continues to hold a long position in XPL worth $9.3 million with an unrealized profit of over $1.23 million.
The situation has sparked widespread discussion in the crypto community due to the apparent manipulations on the platform with a thin order book, creating favorable conditions for such speculative actions.