BITMEX's Mystery Whale

How 7 of the top 25 spots might be one trader

** This is an older article, taken from my medium page. This is just more or less to get used to using substack. **

Awhile back I explored how much the best bitcoin traders made. During that exploration, it was discovered that two accounts on the leaderboard belonged to the same entity

After another week of data collecting it looked like there were now 4 correlating accounts, totaling over 9,300 bitcoin, worth around $100,000,000 USD at a bitcoin value of $10,000.

For those who prefer watching videos!

Leaderboard as of 10/12/19

You can see if we zoom out to the start of when the data collecting started, its clear Hot-Relic-Fancier and Jade-Platinum-Legs are perfectly correlated. Getting two accounts on the leaderboard is impressive, however this would only put them in 3rd place.

I say 3rd place since 2nd place really belongs to Alameda Research, we can see they actually have two public accounts on the leaderboard. Putting them in 2nd place, with a total of 6,940 bitcoin vs 1st place at 7,483 bitcoin at the time of writing.

However, if we were to add up all the correlating accounts (dubbing them Mystery Trader), the real leaderboard would look something like this…

This means that while Heavy-Autumn-Wolf has seemingly reigned supreme for the last year or so, our mystery trader has actually been the true 1st place trader. Here is a screenshot taken last year of the leaderboard, showing Heavy-Autumn-Wolf in 2nd place, reaching 1st soon after.

Judging by the equity curves of two of the mystery trader’s accounts, it looks like the strategy hopes to catch and hold on to large moves, remaining mostly flat otherwise.

The other two larger accounts seem to be market making, but not doing great, percent wise. They aren’t losing that much money though, especially compared to what the other two accounts bring in.

Unfortunately its impossible to know for sure what strategies are being used or what coins they are trading. Nonetheless, these four accounts combined easily take the top spot.

The story doesn’t stop there though. After yet another week of collecting data and creating a tool to seek out correlations, it looks like 3 more accounts correlate with the current mystery trader accounts.

Thing brings the final total (for now) to 7 accounts, totaling 12,955 Bitcoin, almost 13,000. This would, assuming a price of $10,000 per bitcoin be around $130,000,000 USD in profit… however I will add, unless the mystery trader held onto these bitcoin, they probably cashed out under $10,000.

Why this mystery trader hasn’t gone public is anyone’s guess.

If anyone has any more information to contribute feel free to leave a comment and I’ll be happy to look into it!

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[1] Note: The period of Oct. 7th-8th is flat due to a data collection error.