jakiro
Author:Ethan
On November 4, the former giant whale “Machi Big Brother” Huang Licheng (@machibigbrother) took action again. He used the only $16,700 he had left on the decentralized trading platform Hyperliquid platform to reopen a 25x leverage long order for 100 ETH.
24 hours later, the reckoning came again.Early morning of November 5th, monitoring data displayThe account balance is only$1718.This move came just 47 days after his account was at its peak.
Back on September 18, he once made a profit of US$44.84 million by relying on high leverage and long positions, becoming one of the most high-profile contract whales on the chain.However, the 10.11 crash hit the market and the market trembled. Cryptocurrency assets collapsed and continued to decline in the next month. Under the continuous anti-order and position increase operations, Hyperliquid’s liquidation interface flashed red like the center of a storm. Huang Licheng’s account also “collapsed” in the series of forced liquidations: not onlyAll profits were taken away, and the principal of US$15 million was almost reduced to zero. The peak of the account was close to US$60 million, with only “a few taels of silver” left.
In response, he left a message on social media:“Was fun while it lasted.”(“Just be happy.”)
Thirty years ago, he stood in the real “spotlight”.
It was Taiwan in the 1990s, when hip-hop culture first entered the Chinese-speaking world.Wearing loose clothesYoung people wearing jeans, tapping their feet to the beat, and screaming all over the place were the most avant-garde existence at the time.Huang Licheng, the leader of the earliest Hip-pop boy band L.A. Boyz in the Chinese-speaking world, controls the stage, the audience’s rhythm, and the popular sense of the times.
Thirty years later, this man who longed to control the rhythm experienced countless speculations from different angles and methods, trying to stay on top of the tide of capital, but all of this went out of control in the madness and noise.
From hip-hop kid to tech startup
From a trend-setter in the entertainment industry, to a serial entrepreneur on the Internet, to a giant whale in the currency circle and the “Sickle Cut” label, every turn of Huang Licheng, the “Maji Big Brother” in the past two decades has been full of drama and controversy.
Obviously, he is accustomed to being in the spotlight, understands the attention economy, and is unwilling to let go of any opportunity.
Born in Yunlin, Taiwan in 1972, Huang Licheng immigrated to California with his family when he was 2 years old.He is rebellious and street smart.In high school, he formed a dance group called Funky Asian Buddy with his younger brother Huang Lixing and his cousin Lin Zhiwen. They hung out in the streets and alleys all day long, dancing Battle and going to nightclubs to look for opportunities.In 1991, the three were discovered for their unique style and officially returned to the Taiwanese music scene under the name L.A. Boyz.They took the island by storm with their mixed Chinese and English singing and American street style.At that time, the Chinese music scene was still dominated by Japanese idol styles.The American hip-hop brought by L.A. Boyz is refreshing, and Huang Licheng has become a pioneer of Hip-Hop culture in the Chinese-speaking area, setting off a trend.
The L.A. Boyz of that year: Huang Lixing, Lin Zhiwen, Huang Lichen
L.A. Boyz debuted in 1992 and released 13 albums. They were very popular for a while. However, as the Taiwanese music scene turned to the “ballad” style in the mid-to-late 1990s, L.A. Boyz’s cool Hip-Hop Style gradually lost the mainstream market.After disbanding in 1997, Huang Licheng gradually turned to business and behind the scenes, and devoted himself to entrepreneurship in the technology field.
2003,He formed Maji Entertainment, fully involved in music production and artist management.He transitioned from entertainer to owner, producer and businessman.
Huang Licheng always wants to be “the first to eat crabs”, and he is well versed in the art of traffic.While the entertainment industry turned behind the scenes, he turned into a technology entrepreneur.He realized the value of traffic and attention early on.
In 2015, Huang Licheng and technical partnersFounded 17 Media, the main product is “17 Live App”, which focuses on real-time video interactive social networking. At that time, Douyu in the mainland had just been born, and similar products such as Inke and Huajiao had not yet been launched. After the application was launched, it quickly became popular in Taiwan, attracting millions of users. Its valuation was once as high as billions of New Taiwan dollars, and it received investments from Wang Sicong, LeTV Sports, etc.
Huang Licheng spoke at MOX Demo Day as the founder of 17 Media
Due to imperfect supervision in the early years, some content of various good-looking anchors on the APP was too large, and 17 it was temporarily removed from the App Store and Google Play.Afterwards, Huang Licheng led the team to adjust the content mechanism and shift the market focus to Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand and other places.In 2017, 17 Media merged with social application Paktor to form M17 Entertainment, and the platform was renamed 17LIVE. Although Huang Licheng served as chairman, he also began to gradually let go of his shares and cash out.
In 2018, 17 Media tried to list on the New York Stock Exchange, but it was temporarily canceled on the day of listing and the listing plan was aborted.M17 ultimately was unable to meet audit and reporting requirements or overcome the bid threshold on its books, according to people familiar with the matter.Subsequently, the company’s focus shifted to Japan until Huang Licheng resigned from all positions in 2021,Withdraw from management, retain equity, and have the Japanese team take over the main operations.
In addition to 17, Huang Licheng also had many other entrepreneurial attempts, such as “erotic chat platform” Swag, Machi Xcelsior Studios, etc. But most of them did not enter the mainstream field of vision until he encountered the best fertile ground for speculation-the currency circle.
Crazy Moji: Don’t miss a single outlet
With the successful experience of Internet entrepreneurship, Huang Licheng once again spotted the opportunity in the ICO encryption wave in 2017 and joined the blockchain industry.
Aiming at social mining for currency issuance in 2018
At the end of 2017, he continued his 17 years of product experience and led the launch of the blockchain project Mithril (MITH), which focuses on the concept of “social mining” and claims to be a “blockchain version of Instagram”. The core mechanism is that users can earn MITH tokens through algorithms through the algorithm when they publish content on the decentralized social platform Lit and gain interaction.
Mithril conducted a Token private sale on February 21, 2018, raising a total of US$51.6 million (approximately 60,000 ETH at the time), accounting for 10% of the total Token supply.30% of the required amount.In February 2018, 70% of these private sale tokens were unlocked on TGE, and 30% were unlocked within the following three months.
In February 2018, the price of MITH tokens soared once it was listed on exchanges such as OKEX (now OKX) and Binance. However, within the next three months, the team directly sold tokens that accounted for 89% of the total circulating supply at that time, causing the price to plummet by 80%.
Huang Licheng at the Mithril and OKEX cooperation event
After that, the bubble burst and the market turned cold. The project at that time had no concept, the product was full of loopholes, and there were no real users. The price of MITH continued to drop without any resistance, with a drop of more than 99%. Subsequently, products such as Mith Cash were launched in an attempt to restore the decline by stepping on other hot spots, but it was in vain. In 2022, MITH was removed from the shelves by platforms such as Binance, and subsequently it was close to zero.
Obviously, the person who issued the coins made a lot of money, and the person who took the money lost everything.The Mithril project gave Huang Licheng an initial reputation as “Pump and Dump” in the early currency circle.
DeFi protocol launched in 2020
In 2018, Huang Licheng also participated in the founding of Baodao Finance, which is known as a treasury management platform created by a blockchain company.At one time, $23 million (44,000 ETH) was raised. The project was only listed on a few decentralized exchanges and then quickly went to zero.
In addition, Huang Licheng also launched a trading platform for centralized copyrights.Taiwan Machi
Until July 2020, DeFi Summer hit.
He turned to the hot DeFi mining field and quickly launched the lending protocol Cream Finance.As a fork project of Compound, Cream supports more long-tail asset lending and rose rapidly with high-yield mining, with TVL exceeding US$1 billion at its peak.
However, at that time, DeFi protocols were developing at a rapid pace, but there were many flaws and loopholes in mechanism design and security defense design, which led to frequent hacker attacks and many protocols became hacker cash machines.Especially the design of the “flash loan” that was criticized later – flash loan is an unsecured lending mechanism in DeFi. Users can lend any amount of funds in the same block, as long as the principal + interest is returned before the end of the block, otherwise the entire transaction will be rolled back.The original intention of this design was to facilitate arbitrage, refinancing, mortgage adjustment and other operations, but it actually provided a breeding ground for hackers.
In 2021, Cream Finance suffered at least 5 hacking incidents.
In February, Cream Finance’s “Iron Bank” cross-protocol lending aggregation scheme was exploited, with attackers manipulating asset prices (or asset value calculations) to lend out assets far in excess of their collateral value.The damage was approximately $37.5 million.
In August, Cream Finance was attacked again – the C.R.E.A.M. v1 market on Ethereum was exploited, and attackers used a reentrancy bug in the AMP token contract to attack.Damage estimated at approximately $34 million
In October, Cream Finance suffered one of the largest fatal attacks at the time, and Cream’s Ethereum v1 market was breached again.This time it is a flash loan attack + price oracle/stock price valuation manipulation.The losses amounted to about $130 million.
Security incidents that Cream Finance experienced in the same year also included domain name DNS hijacking and exploited vulnerabilities.
Under the dual pressure of a crisis of trust and technical vulnerabilities, Huang Licheng chose to hand over control of the protocol to Andre Cronje, the well-known founder of Yearn, the king of DeFi, and made a soft landing through strategic cooperation, while he faded out of daily operations.
After that, Huang Licheng also led and participated in various DeFi protocol fork projects many times, but they were basically unsuccessful and died soon after.
Switch to the NFT battlefield in 2021
When the NFT craze swept across, he once again stood on the forefront and became an NFT OG.
In 2021, perhaps because of his familiarity with traffic gameplay, Huang Licheng set his sights on the NFT track early on, and began to mint and hoard leading blue-chip NFT series early on, especially the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) boring ape series. The casting price was only 0.08 ETH. After a few months, the floor price increased by more than 100 ETH, allowing NFT to achieve a crazy wealth creation effect and break the circle. Huang Licheng, who is already a star, took advantage of the opportunity to promote andBAYC gave it to celebrities such as Jay Chou and gained great exposure.
In 2022, the Odaily Planet Daily reported that he owned 102 Mutant Apes MAYC, 55 Boring Apes BAYC, and 1.51 million APE tokens (worth about $24 million at the time) in a single address. Every time it fell, he would buy goods aggressively, attracting a large number of media to report on his address. He was well-deserved as one of the largest whales in NFT at that time.
Things took a turn for the worse in the token points activity of the NFT trading platform Blur. After Blur launched its second season airdrop point activity, “Big Brother Moji” has been occupying the top spot in the points list and has made frequent transactions.Huang Licheng owns a large number of BAYC and other blue-chip NFTs, and earns trading points through placing orders and bidding, while increasing the liquidity of NFTs.However, as the NFT market declined in 2023, users who earned points were not as active as before, and people holding a bunch of NFTs began to find ways to ship them.
Blur’s liquidity creates favorable selling conditions for NFT traders.Blur’s market-making incentive mechanism allows traders to list NFTs on Blur at prices close to the floor, further creating a tight bid-ask spread that makes Blur’s floor price lower than prices on other markets.This approach will continue to create a moat for Blur and increase bidding depth.
“Big Brother Moji” was unlucky in this giant whale game. He took over 71 BAYC and 77 CryptoPunks in a few days and suffered heavy losses. He then urgently sold more than 1,000 NFTs, causing the floor price of BAYC to fall by 25.5%.Although he “buys high and sells low,” his massive selling of NFTs to drain liquidity also earned him accusations of “big cuts.”
All in all, it was a fierce operation, and in the end I was tricked by the platform.According to subsequent statistics, Huang Licheng lost at least more than 5,000 ETH in Blur’s back-and-forth points game.
Subsequently, the NFT market continued to slump and failed to recover.In April 2023, Huang Licheng issued a document stating that he would withdraw from the NFT market.
To this day, there are still many NFT corpses lying in his wallet.
2024 public offering meme
In 2024, the Solana meme will usher in spring. The “one contract address, send me money” model explodes in popularity, and Huang Licheng once again “embraces the opportunity.”
He launched Boba Oppa ($BOBAOPPA), named after his dog, on the Solana chain.The project raised more than 200,000 SOL (worth more than 40 million US dollars) through pre-sale within 24 hours. However, the currency price fell by more than 70% on the day it went online. He also transferred some of the raised funds into DeFi protocol Staking, which was another classic “big cut” performance.
Subsequently, Boba Oppa also tried to pull the market by creating and destroying other benefits, but in the end, it was naturally lost to the numerous Meme and quietly returned to zero.
Hyperliquid Whale of the Whale – Profit of $45 Million and Lose All
In 2025, with Hyperliquid’s high degree of transparency, the world’s onlookers and the media’s real-time follow-up reports, Huang Licheng may be excited again to become a “strategic” whale.
“Big Brother Moji” Hyperliquid account position income chart
Section 1: The splendor and undercurrent of midsummer
The story always starts with a big profit.In June, he easily gained more than US$6.5 million in floating profits by accurately operating his HYPE position; in July, his total long position in Hyperliquid climbed to$126 million, becoming the top whale on the platform.However, the seeds of risk were also planted at this moment: he was stubbornly bullish on the PUMP project, causing the single-month loss to quickly expand toOver $10 million.Although it started to stop losses at the end of July, this huge loss has eroded the previous profit basis.
In August, the market took a sharp turn for the worse and rebounded suddenly.The household profit and loss curve is like a violent roller coaster.At the beginning of the month, his cumulative losses on PUMP amounted to$9.94 million, the early profits were almost wiped out; however, as ETH rebounded, the floating profits once broke through in the middle$30 million.On August 13, he decisively closed all positions and locked$33.83 million profit.But the short-term rationality was fleeting, and he immediately went short ETH, but was “counterattacked” by the rapid rebound of the market, and his profits were significantly retracted.
Throughout August, he almost never pressed the pause button, frequently opening, adding, and closing positions, trying to catch up with the market at a fast pace.Although losses narrowed at the end of the month, the anxiety of “making money but not being able to keep it” has begun to erode confidence.
Section 2: The peak and turning point of September
Entering September, Brother Maji seems to have regained his rhythm.He reduced leverage to 15x, frequently shorted his position, and made a small profit on the short ASTER trade.ArriveSeptember 19, the floating profit of his account climbed to nearly$45 million——This is his historical peak on Hyperliquid.
However, the apex often meansIt means a turning point.In late September, ETH, HYPE, and PUMP all fell, and his core positions quickly fell into floating losses. The maximum loss once exceeded$20 million.
To avoid liquidation, he added to the platform on September 254.72 million USDC deposit.What is even more ironic is that in the midst of the crisis, he still chose to take a heavy position in the new XPL, trying to “fight with war” to reverse the defeat.By the end of the month, his position was still worth$176 million, but behind this huge scale, the financial defense line is already crumbling.
Section 3: October’s Death Spiral: Liquidation, Cover-up, and Liquidation Again
October was the beginning of complete collapse.Near the peakUS$45 million floating profit, almost gone within 20 days.ArriveOctober 9, the account profit is only about$1 million.The next day, he was forced to close his XPL and other positions,Single-day loss of $21.53 million, from then on the account officially turned from profit to loss.
Throughout the next month, he fell into a typical “death spiral”:Market falls → Highly leveraged long orders are close to liquidation → Capital is injected to cover positions → Liquidated again → Open positions again.
This cycle repeated itself no fewer than ten times in October.Like a loser’s gambler, constantly “covering positions”, but every time they cover positions, they are mercilessly swallowed up by a more violent decline.On October 11, October 14, October 23, October 30…his positions were liquidated again and again.Although the market occasionally rebounded during the period, resulting in a floating profit of nearly one million US dollars on his small position, this was only a drop in the bucket compared to the huge deficit.By October 31, his total losses amounted to$14.5 million.
The end?November’s Total Rout
There are no miracles for markets in November.
On November 3, the 25 times ETH long order he insisted on was completely liquidated, with losses reaching$15 million.
On November 4, his Hyperliquid account balance was down to$16,771.However, he still chose to enter the market again – using the remaining funds to open a25 times long order of 100 ETH.
24 hours later, the reckoning happened again.Early morning of November 5th, monitoring data shows that the account balance is only$1718, everything returns to zero.
From steady profits in June, to a peak of nearly $60 million in total account assets in September, to losing all money in November, this five-month trading war was full of shock, but it is not uncommon in the currency circle.
The same story plays out every day, with different protagonists and details.
On the same day that Brother Maji suffered heavy losses, he had won fourteen times in a row on Hyperliquid with a 100% winning rate. Multiple long positions of the “insider whale” were liquidated and actively liquidated. The account dropped from a maximum profit of more than 25.34 million US dollars to a net loss of 30.02 million US dollars, leaving about 1.4 million US dollars. Afterwards, he backhand chased short, but the market began to rebound, and now there is only 570,000 US dollars left in the account.
In the past, James Wayne, Hyperliquid’s number one online celebrity whale, once made a quick profit of more than 43 million US dollars with high leverage. He was also subject to serial liquidations during the plunge and lost all his principal. Since then, he has been moving around and scraping together. He managed to collect tens of thousands of dollars to continue placing orders and was liquidated. He also took advantage of the trend and became a KOL, doing rebates to accumulate the next round of “gambling chips”, and the cycle repeats.
They are now continuing to open orders with small positions and increasing leverage. Although this article is called “Return to Zero”, we have no doubt that “serial entrepreneur” Huang Licheng must have a way to scrape up some capital to continue opening orders.
In this story, they are all like Sisyphus pushing the boulder again and again, never able to escape reincarnation and reach the peak again.
Conclusion: Speeding up again and again may be a prelude to accelerated demise.
Huang Licheng can be said to be the most vivid footnote in the encryption era, and can even be called a living fossil. He actively and quickly participates in every wealth opportunity, and soon escapes from his shell and rushes to the next gold nugget battlefield.This is also reincarnation in another dimension.
In the currency circle, the life cycle of every hot trend is being extremely compressed.
In the sharing of top traders, we often hear the “golden rule” of “slow is fast”.But in this market where the rotation of hot spots is like a raging fire cooking oil, no one has long believed that “slow is fast”. There is only too slow, not fast enough, and it should be faster.
In the past, it was necessary to draw a beautiful white paper, tell a self-supporting story, and perhaps spend time polishing the product prototype before the project could be monetized.
Later, after posting a contract address on social media and cheering, tens of millions of “idiots” directly sent money. Even the President of the United States did this, and a project with a market value of tens of billions of dollars was instantly born.
Accelerating to the extreme and falling into madness again and again, the “giant whales” are even more addicted to clicking the buttons to open and close positions, and pocket hundreds of millions of wealth.
Here, attention and appeal have become real money, but the assets in the account have become illusory gambling chips. In the abnormal industry structure, getting lost seems to be inevitable, the narrative is forever reincarnated, and wealth is always created and devoured.Getting rich overnight and falling instantly are just commonplace.
The ultimate irony is that there will always be the next big brother Ma Ji who returns to zero in the currency circle, and more people still aspire to be him.
