Two large crypto whale movements on August 13, 2026, showed contrasting strategies: one closed a leveraged Ethereum position for a significant profit, while another continued accumulating Hyperliquid's native token HYPE.
Ethereum whale takes profit after borrowing. According to on-chain analytics service EmberCN, a wallet beginning with 0x7099 borrowed 30 million USDS from the DeFi lending protocol Spark on June 7. The funds were used to buy 18,212 ETH at an average price of $1,647 per token. On August 13, the same wallet sold 15,993 ETH at an average price of $1,889 and repaid 30.20 million USDS to close the loan. With the remaining ETH and price difference, the whale locked in an estimated profit of $4.3 million. The sale occurred after Ethereum climbed from below $1,700 in early June to above $1,900, suggesting profit-taking after the rally.
Anonymous whale keeps buying HYPE. Onchain Lens reported that a separate anonymous whale bought 40,000 HYPE tokens for about $2.3 million on Coinbase. That purchase brought the wallet's total accumulation to 260,000 HYPE, worth roughly $15.1 million, over two months across Coinbase, Bybit and other platforms. HYPE is the native token of Hyperliquid, a decentralized perpetual futures platform, and is used for fees, staking, and governance. The multi-exchange buying pattern may reduce immediate market impact, but it also adds potential sell-side risk if the whale later exits.
These transactions highlight the growing role of DeFi lending and on-chain analytics in tracking large-scale crypto strategies. Still, analysts caution that whale activity is only one factor influencing prices and should not be treated as a guaranteed signal.
