Whales Yanked 104.7M XRP While Four Mystery Wallets Shorted $BTC Into the Void 🐋

Four newly created wallets deposited $1 million in USDC into Hyperliquid and opened 40x short positions covering 148.49 BTC, with a notional value of about $12.5 million, shortly before Bitcoin's price fell below $84,000, according to Lookonchain. The wallets were created immediately before the trades were placed.

Separately, Binance and Upbit XRP reserves dropped by a combined 104.7 million tokens between late September and early October. Binance reserves declined from roughly 2.704 billion XRP on September 26 to 2.631 billion on October 4, while Upbit reserves fell from around 6.446 billion XRP on September 11 to 6.415 billion on October 5.

CryptoQuant's seven-day average showed whales accounting for about 77% of XRP exchange outflows, compared with 22.8% for retail participants. On Binance, the split was more concentrated: large holders represented about 81% of outflows, while retail accounted for 18.7%. The figures describe the composition of withdrawals rather than the identity or eventual intentions of every wallet involved.

CryptoQuant also put Binance's 30-day total of XRP whale outflows at about 1.38 billion tokens, described as a seven-month high. Over the same 30-day window, however, roughly 1.6 billion XRP entered Binance, indicating two-way flows on the platform.

The Bitcoin derivatives signal is more explicitly bearish in posture, though its market implications are limited by the size and anonymity of the wallets. Lookonchain's reporting did not identify the operators behind the four Hyperliquid addresses, and no direct link between the short trades and the $BTC price drop below $84,000 has been established.