Author: Ethan; Editor: Planet Flower

On November 4th, former whale "Machi Big Brother" Huang Licheng (@machibigbrother) made another move, using his remaining $16,700 on the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid to open a 25x leveraged long position of 100 ETH.

Twenty-four hours later, liquidation struck again. In the early hours of November 5th, monitoring data showed the account balance was a mere $1,718. This occurred just 47 days after the account's peak asset value.

Back on September 18th, thanks to his heavily leveraged long positions, he once had a floating profit of $44.84 million, becoming one of the most watched contract whales on the blockchain. However, the sudden crash on October 11th shook the market, and crypto assets plummeted, continuing to decline over the next month. With his persistent attempts to hold his positions and add to them, Hyperliquid's liquidation interface flashed red like the eye of a storm, and Huang Licheng's account "collapsed" in a series of forced liquidations: not only were all his profits wiped out, but his principal of $15 million was also almost gone, leaving his account, which had peaked at nearly $60 million, with only a few measly coins left.

In response, he posted on social media: "Was fun while it lasted."

Thirty years ago, he stood under the real "spotlight".

That was Taiwan in the 1990s, when hip-hop culture was just entering the Chinese-speaking world. Young people dressed in baggy jeans, stomping their feet to the beat, and screaming throughout the venue were the most avant-garde at the time. Huang Licheng, the leader of LA Boyz, one of the earliest hip-hop boy bands in the Chinese-speaking world, controlled the stage, controlled the rhythm of the audience, and controlled the sense of fashion of the era.

Thirty years later, this man, who longed to control the pace of life, engaged in countless speculations from different angles and in different ways, trying to stand at the forefront of the tide of capital. However, all of this spiraled out of control amidst madness and clamor.

From hip-hop kid to tech entrepreneur

From a trendsetter in the entertainment industry to a serial entrepreneur in the internet industry, and then to a cryptocurrency whale and known as a "scythe-wielding tycoon," Huang Licheng's every transformation over the past two decades has been dramatic and controversial.

Clearly, he is used to being in the spotlight, understands the attention economy, and is unwilling to let any opportunity slip by.

Born in Yunlin, Taiwan in 1972, Jeff Huang immigrated to California with his family at the age of two. He was rebellious and possessed a strong street savvy. During high school, he formed a dance group called Funky Asian Buddy with his younger brother Stanley Huang and cousin Chih-wen Lin, spending their days on the streets, dancing, battling, and seeking opportunities in nightclubs. In 1991, the trio was discovered for their unique style and officially returned to the Taiwanese music scene as LA Boyz. Their mixed Mandarin and English vocals and American street style swept across the island. At that time, the Chinese music scene was dominated by Japanese idol styles, and LA Boyz's American hip-hop was refreshing. Jeff Huang became a pioneer of hip-hop culture in the Chinese-speaking world, creating a sensation.

 The original LA Boyz: Lin Chih-wen (left), Huang Li-hsing (center), Huang Li-cheng (right)

LA Boyz debuted in 1992 and released 13 albums, becoming a sensation. However, as the Taiwanese music scene shifted towards a "ballad" style in the mid-to-late 1990s, LA Boyz's cool hip-hop style gradually lost its mainstream market. After disbanding in 1997, Huang Licheng gradually turned to business and behind-the-scenes work, and devoted himself to entrepreneurship in the technology field.

In 2003, he founded Machi Entertainment, venturing into music production and artist management. He transitioned from an artist to a boss, producer, and businessman.

Huang Licheng always wanted to be a pioneer, and he was also a master of leveraging online traffic. While transitioning from the entertainment industry to behind-the-scenes work, he became a tech entrepreneur. He recognized the value of online traffic and attention very early on.

In 2015, Huang Licheng and his technical partner founded 17 Media, whose flagship product was the "17 Live App," which focused on real-time video interactive social networking. At that time, Douyu had just been launched in mainland China, and similar products such as Yingke and Huajiao had not yet been launched. After its launch, the app quickly became popular in Taiwan, attracting millions of users and reaching a valuation of several billion New Taiwan Dollars. It also received investment from Wang Sicong, LeSports, and others.

 Huang Licheng, as the founder of 17 Media, gave a speech at MOX Demo Day.

Due to inadequate regulation in its early years, some content from various attractive live streamers on the app was deemed too explicit, leading to 17 being temporarily removed from the App Store and Google Play. Subsequently, Huang Licheng led the team to adjust the content mechanism and shift the market focus to Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and other regions. In 2017, 17 Media merged with the social app Paktor to form M17 Entertainment, and the platform was renamed 17LIVE. Although Huang Licheng remained chairman, he gradually began to relinquish his shares and cash out, exiting the market.

In 2018, 17 Media attempted to list on the New York Stock Exchange, but the listing was abruptly canceled on the day of listing, and the IPO plan fell through. According to sources, M17 ultimately failed to meet audit and reporting requirements and could not overcome its book bidding threshold. Subsequently, the company shifted its focus to Japan until 2021 when Huang Licheng resigned from all positions, stepped down from management, retained equity, and the Japanese team took over the main operations.

Besides 17, Huang Licheng also tried many other ventures, such as the "erotic chat platform" Swag and the Machi Xcelsior Studios, but most of them did not enter the mainstream view until he encountered the best speculative ground - the cryptocurrency circle.

Crazy Buddies: Not a single trend can be missed

Having gained success in internet entrepreneurship, Huang Licheng seized another opportunity in the ICO crypto wave of 2017 and entered the blockchain industry.

In 2018, the focus was on issuing cryptocurrencies based on social mining.

At the end of 2017, he continued his product experience from 2017 and spearheaded the launch of the blockchain project Mithril (MITH), which focused on the concept of "social mining" and claimed to be creating a "blockchain version of Instagram". The core mechanism is that users can earn MITH tokens by publishing content and getting interaction on the decentralized social platform Lit, and then reward the creators.

On February 21, 2018, Mithril conducted a private token sale, raising $51.6 million (approximately 60,000 ETH at the time), representing 30% of the total token supply. In February 2018, 70% of these privately placed tokens were unlocked on TGE, and 30% were unlocked over the following three months.

In February 2018, the price of MITH tokens surged after they were listed on exchanges such as OKEX (now OKX) and Binance. However, the price plummeted by 80% as the team directly sold off 89% of the tokens that were in circulation at the time within the next three months.

 Huang Licheng at the Mithril and OKEX collaboration event

Then, the bubble burst and the market cooled down. The project at that time was just a concept with many flaws and no real users. The price of MITH continued to fall without resistance, with a drop of more than 99%. Later, products such as Mith Cash were launched in an attempt to ride the wave of other hot topics to reverse the decline, but it was all in vain. In 2022, MITH was delisted from Binance and other platforms, and subsequently went close to zero.

Clearly, the issuers made a fortune, while those who bought in lost everything. The Mithril project established Huang Licheng's initial reputation as an "early cryptocurrency scammer, pump and dump."

DeFi protocols launched in 2020

In 2018, Huang Licheng also co-founded Formosa Financial, which claimed to be a vault management platform built by a blockchain company. It once raised $23 million (44,000 ETH), but the project was only listed on a few decentralized exchanges before quickly going to zero.

In addition, Huang Licheng launched Machi X, a previously centralized copyright trading platform, but due to his previous reputation as a "scythe," the project struggled to raise funds and ultimately failed.

Until July 2020, the DeFi Summer arrived.

He turned to the booming DeFi mining sector and quickly launched the lending protocol Cream Finance. As a fork of Compound, Cream supported lending on more long-tail assets and rose rapidly with its high-yield mining, reaching a peak TVL of over $1 billion.

However, the rapid development of DeFi protocols at the time, often rushed and unnecessarily, resulted in numerous flaws and vulnerabilities in their mechanism and security design, leading to frequent hacker attacks. Many protocols became easy targets for hackers. The much-criticized "flash loan" design was particularly problematic. Flash loans are a type of unsecured lending mechanism in DeFi that allows users to borrow any amount of funds within the same block, provided they repay the principal and interest before the block ends; otherwise, the transaction is rolled back. While initially intended to facilitate arbitrage, refinancing, and collateral adjustments, this design actually provided fertile ground for hackers.

In 2021, Cream Finance suffered at least five hacker attacks.

In February, Cream Finance's "Iron Bank" cross-protocol lending consolidation scheme was exploited, with attackers manipulating asset prices (or asset valuations) to lend assets far exceeding their collateral value. The loss was approximately $37.5 million.

In August, Cream Finance suffered another attack—the CREAM v1 market on Ethereum was exploited by attackers who used a reentrancy bug in the AMP token contract. The estimated losses were approximately $34 million.

In October, Cream Finance suffered one of the largest and most devastating attacks at the time, with its Ethereum v1 market once again breached. This attack, involving a flash loan and price oracle/stock valuation manipulation, resulted in losses of approximately $130 million.

Cream Finance also experienced other security incidents that year, including DNS hijacking and vulnerability exploitation.

Faced with the dual pressures of a crisis of trust and technical vulnerabilities, Huang Licheng chose to hand over control of the protocol to Andre Cronje, the founder of the well-known DeFi king Yearn, for a soft landing through strategic cooperation, and faded out of daily operations.

Huang Licheng later led and participated in various DeFi protocol fork projects, but they were mostly unsuccessful and died shortly afterward.

In 2021, they shifted their focus to the NFT arena.

When the NFT craze swept in, he once again stood at the forefront, transforming himself into an NFT OG.

In 2021, perhaps due to his familiarity with traffic-driven strategies, Huang Licheng had an early eye on the NFT sector. He began minting and accumulating top-tier blue-chip NFT series early on, especially the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) series. The minting price was only 0.08 ETH, but a few months later the price rose by more than 100 ETH, enabling NFTs to achieve a crazy wealth-creating effect and break into the mainstream. Huang Licheng, who was already a celebrity, took advantage of the situation to promote it, giving BAYC to celebrities such as Jay Chou, gaining huge exposure.

In 2022, Odaily reported that his single address held 102 MAYC mutant apes, 55 BAYC bored apes, and 1.51 million APE tokens (worth approximately $24 million at the time). He would also buy up large quantities of these tokens whenever the price dropped, attracting numerous media outlets to report on his address. He was undoubtedly one of the biggest NFT whales at the time.

The situation took a sharp turn for the worse during Blur's token points event on the NFT trading platform. After Blur launched its second season of airdrop points, "Brother Machi" consistently topped the points leaderboard and was extremely active in trading. Huang Licheng owned a large number of BAYC and other blue-chip NFTs, earning trading points by placing orders and bidding, thus increasing the liquidity of NFTs. However, as the NFT market cooled down and declined in 2023, users earning points became less active, and those holding a large number of NFTs began to find ways to sell them.

Blur's liquidity creates favorable selling conditions for NFT traders. Blur's market-making incentives allow traders to list NFTs on Blur at near-floor prices, further creating a tight bid-ask spread, making Blur's floor price lower than prices on other markets. This continuously builds a moat for Blur, increasing bid depth.

"Brother Machi" suffered a major setback in this whale game, buying 71 BAYC tokens and 77 CryptoPunks over several days, incurring heavy losses. He then urgently sold over 1,000 NFTs, causing BAYC's floor price to plummet by as much as 25.5%. Although he bought high and sold low, his massive sell-off of NFTs, which drained liquidity, earned him widespread accusations of "Brother Machi's ruthless exploitation."

In short, he made a series of impressive moves, only to be played by the platform in the end. According to subsequent statistics, Huang Licheng lost at least 5,000 ETH in this back-and-forth point game on Blur.

The NFT market subsequently remained sluggish and never recovered. In April 2023, Huang Licheng announced his withdrawal from the NFT market.

Even now, his wallet still contains a number of NFT corpses.

2024 public offering meme

In 2024, the Solana-based memes ushered in a golden age, with the "one contract address, send me money" model becoming wildly popular, and Huang Licheng once again "embraced the opportunity".

He launched Boba Oppa ($BOBAOPPA) on the Solana blockchain, named after his dog. The project raised over 200,000 SOL tokens (worth over $40 million) through a pre-sale within 24 hours, but the price of the token plummeted by over 70% on the day of its launch. He also transferred some of the raised funds to the DeFi protocol Staking, another classic "big scam".

Boba Oppa subsequently attempted to boost its price by creating positive factors such as asset burns, but ultimately it quietly disappeared among the many memes and went to zero.

Hyperliquid's Whale Tragedy – From $45 Million in Profit to Utter Loss

In 2025, with Hyperliquid's high level of transparency, the world's attention, and the media's real-time follow-up reports, becoming a "strategic" behemoth might excite Huang Licheng once again.

 "Brother Machi" Hyperliquid account position profit chart

Section 1: The Brilliance and Undercurrents of Midsummer

The story always begins with substantial profits. In June, he easily reaped over $6.5 million in unrealized gains thanks to precise trading of his HYPE positions; in July, his total long positions on Hyperliquid climbed to $126 million, making him a top whale on the platform. However, the seeds of risk were sown at this moment: his stubborn bullish stance on the PUMP project caused his monthly losses to rapidly expand to over $10 million. Although he began to cut his losses at the end of July, this huge loss had already eroded his previous profit base.

In August, the market experienced a sharp downturn followed by a sudden rebound, making his account's profit and loss curve resemble a violent rollercoaster. At the beginning of the month, his accumulated losses on PUMP reached $9.94 million, almost wiping out his previous profits; however, with the rebound of ETH, his unrealized profits briefly exceeded $30 million by mid-month. On August 13, he decisively closed all his positions, locking in $33.83 million in profits. But this brief moment of rationality was fleeting; he immediately reversed course and shorted ETH, only to be "killed" by the market's rapid rebound, resulting in a significant retracement of his profits.

Throughout August, he almost never paused, frequently opening, adding to, and closing positions, trying to catch up with the market at a fast pace. Although his losses narrowed by the end of the month, the anxiety of "making money but not being able to hold onto it" began to erode his confidence.

Section Two: The Peak and Turning Point in September

Entering September, Brother Machi seemed to have regained his rhythm. He reduced his leverage to 15x, frequently engaged in short-term trading, and made small profits on his short position in ASTER. By September 19, his account's unrealized gains had climbed to nearly $45 million—his all-time high on Hyperliquid.

However, a peak often signifies a turning point. In late September, ETH, HYPE, and PUMP all plummeted, and his core positions quickly fell into unrealized losses, with the largest loss exceeding $20 million.

To avoid liquidation, he deposited an additional 4.72 million USDC into the platform on September 25th. Ironically, even amidst the crisis, he chose to heavily invest in the new asset XPL, attempting to "fight against the tide" to reverse his losses. By the end of the month, his total position value was still a staggering $176 million, but behind this massive scale, his financial defenses were already crumbling.

Section 3: The Death Spiral in October: Liquidation, Averaging Down, and More Liquidation

October marked the beginning of the complete collapse. His peak profit of nearly $45 million vanished almost entirely within 20 days. By October 9th, the account's profit had dwindled to approximately $1 million. The following day, he was forced to close out positions such as XPL, incurring a single-day loss of $21.53 million, officially turning the account from profit to loss.

For the rest of the month, he was caught in a classic "death spiral": market decline → high-leverage long positions nearing liquidation → additional funds injected to cover losses → liquidation again → opening new positions.

This cycle repeated itself no less than ten times in October. Like a gambler who had lost everything, he kept "averaging down," but each time he did so, his positions were mercilessly swallowed up by an even more violent drop. October 11th, October 14th, October 23rd, October 30th… his positions were liquidated time and time again. Although there were occasional market rebounds that brought him nearly a million dollars in unrealized profits on his small positions, it was just a drop in the ocean compared to the enormous losses. By October 31st, his total losses had reached $14.5 million.

The endgame? The utter defeat in November.

There were no miracles in the November market.

On November 3, his long position in ETH at 25x leverage was completely liquidated, resulting in a loss of $15 million.

On November 4th, his Hyperliquid account balance was only $16,771. However, he still chose to re-enter the market—using this remaining capital to open a 25x long position of 100 ETH.

Twenty-four hours later, liquidation occurred again. In the early morning of November 5th, monitoring data showed that the account balance was only $1,718, and everything was wiped out.

From steady profits in June to a peak of nearly $60 million in total account assets in September, and then to complete financial ruin in November, this five-month-long trading battle was shocking, but also a common occurrence in the cryptocurrency world.

The same story plays out every day, only the main characters and details differ.

On the same day that Brother Machi suffered heavy losses, several of his long positions on Hyperliquid, which had a 100% win rate and were known as the "insider whale," were forcibly liquidated and actively closed. His account plummeted from a peak profit of over $25.34 million to a net loss of $30.02 million, leaving him with about $1.4 million. He then reversed his position and went short, but the market began to rebound, and now his account has only $570,000 left.

James Wayne, the former top Hyperliquid influencer, once made over $43 million with high leverage. However, he also suffered a series of liquidations during the crash, losing all his principal. After that, he kept moving around, scraping together tens of thousands of dollars to continue trading, only to be liquidated again. He then took advantage of the situation to become a KOL, earning commissions to accumulate "gambling chips" for the next round, and the cycle repeated itself.

They are now using small positions to increase leverage and open new trades. Although this article is titled "Returning to Zero," we have no doubt that Huang Licheng, the "serial entrepreneur," must have plenty of ways to raise some capital to continue opening new trades.

In this story, they are all like Sisyphus, pushing the boulder again and again, unable to escape the cycle and advance towards the summit once more.

Conclusion: Each acceleration may be the prelude to a faster demise.

Huang Licheng is arguably the most vivid embodiment of the crypto era, even a living fossil. He actively and quickly seizes every wealth opportunity, only to quickly slip away and rush to the next gold rush battlefield. This is another dimension of reincarnation.

In the cryptocurrency world, the lifespan of each trending wave is being compressed to an extreme degree.

In the sharing of top traders, we often hear the golden rule of "slow is fast". But in this market where hot spots rotate like oil on a hot fire, no one believes in "slow is fast" anymore. There is only too slow, not fast enough, and should be faster.

In the past, drawing up a beautiful white paper and telling a self-consistent story might have required spending time polishing the product prototype before a project could be listed on cryptocurrency and cashed out.

Later, a contract address was posted on social media, and with a shout, millions of "fools" directly transferred money. Even the US president did it, and a project with a market value of tens of billions of dollars was born in an instant.

With each extreme acceleration and each moment of madness, these "whales" became obsessed with clicking the buttons to open or close positions, pocketing hundreds of millions in wealth.

Here, attention and influence become real money, while assets in accounts become illusory gambling chips. In this distorted industry structure, getting lost seems inevitable. The narrative is perpetually cyclical, and wealth is forever created and devoured. Overnight riches and instantaneous downfalls are commonplace.

The ultimate irony is that there will always be another "Big Brother Machi" who goes to zero in the crypto world, while many more people still aspire to be him.

A wallet spent $547,000 to buy "Binance Life" yesterday, and is currently experiencing a paper loss of $157,000.

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