A second big Zcash short is close to forced exit. A Hyperliquid wallet labeled 0x362a sold 15,785 ZEC at $867 on Sept. 4, and the position is now down $5.27 million after ZEC pushed to $1,249 this week, according to on-chain data cited by Bitcoin.com News. The trader’s free margin reads zero, and the short liquidates at $1,316.95, roughly 10% above the current price.
The account is not a typical retail blowup. Lookonchain data shows the same wallet has won 26 bets in a row, a streak that made the ZEC short one of the most watched positions on the platform. The wallet also holds $105,813 in spot assets, but that does not count as usable collateral for the isolated position.
Two bets against the same idea
The ZEC trade is only half the story. The same address is short 30,000 tokenized Strategy shares on Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 equity perpetuals, isolated at 8x, entered at $133.35 with the mark near $146.04. That leg is down $381,812, or 52% of its margin, and would liquidate at $162.37. Strategy stock closed Sept. 5 at $142.55 on Nasdaq, so the on-chain mark ran slightly hot over the weekend.
Both trades express the same view: fade the two most crowded rallies of September. ZEC is up 134% in 30 days. Strategy resumed buying bitcoin on Aug. 31 with 4,603 BTC at an average $80,318, taking its holdings to 845,050 BTC, and its shares trade as a leveraged proxy for bitcoin’s price. When a treasury company that holds 845,050 bitcoin starts buying again after a 10-week pause, betting against its stock is a crowded trade in itself, and the wallet is on the wrong side of it.
How this ends
Three paths are live. If the trader covers the short, the buy-back of 15,785 ZEC could carry the price through $1,317 within minutes, given how thin order books get at highs. If ZEC retraces, the pain eases fast: the 24-hour range already spans $1,024 to $1,256, and a pullback toward $1,000 would cut losses by roughly $3 million and rebuild margin. The third path is a fresh deposit, and nothing in the data so far shows one coming.
ZEC’s climb past $1,200 has already put the platform’s largest short seller, Garrett Jin, $25.7 million underwater on 32,760 ZEC opened near $444 in early July, as reported by Cryptonomist citing on-chain analyst Ember. That position also carries a $107 million bitcoin long, up about $4.4 million, which cushions the damage. Jin’s wallet has more room than 0x362a’s, but the direction of the squeeze is the same.
Why the squeeze matters beyond one wallet
Short liquidations on a low-liquidity token feed on themselves. When a forced buy-back hits the market, the price moves higher, which triggers the next liquidation closer in. CoinGlass data from the Sept. 4 breakout showed about $13.2 million in ZEC positions liquidated in 24 hours, with shorts taking $11.3 million of that, a 562% imbalance favoring longs.
The rally itself is leverage-heavy. A whale who bought 22,840 ZEC at an average $48.44 between 2021 and 2024 moved the full position to Binance on Sept. 5, banking roughly $22 million, about a 20x return. Distribution from early holders at these levels is one reason analysts at several desks flag correction risk even as the trend runs.
ZEC’s advance traces back to one institutional catalyst: Grayscale’s launch of the first US spot Zcash ETF on NYSE Arca in late August. The fund’s first days of trading coincided with a 60% rally that took ZEC from roughly $800 to $1,051 by Sept. 4. ETF inflows, short covering and thin liquidity have compounded since.
The wider altcoin market has added to the pressure. Altcoin perpetual futures now hold more open interest than bitcoin for the first time since December 2024, a sign leverage has spread well beyond one token. When that much speculative positioning sits on the long side, a reversal hits harder and faster than the same move in a spot-led rally.
Whether 0x362a survives the week depends less on fundamentals than on where the next cluster of liquidation prices sits. ZEC traded near $1,210 at the time of writing, about 8% below the wallet’s liquidation line. A single hour of buying pressure like the one that took the price through $1,200 would settle the question.
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