TradingBeats, formerly Hyperinsight, said on Aug. 19 that open interest in the MU-USDC perpetual contract on Hyperliquid has dropped to roughly $138 million. Compared with nearly $300 million in July, that marks a decline of more than 60% and puts the contract at its lowest open-interest level in almost two and a half months. In the past 24 hours, liquidations were concentrated on long positions, though no notably large liquidation amount was recorded. The top liquidation entries included Kvyadav1:vishnuvamsi.eth at $77,700 around 20 hours earlier, 0x4a...8f7b at $55,900 around 14 hours earlier, and 0x59...7716 at $55,500 around four hours earlier. Position concentration also remained elevated: the largest address held about $9.65 million, or 7% of total open interest; the top five addresses held about $35.92 million, or 26.1%; and the top 10 addresses held about $54.36 million, or 39.5%. TradingBeats also showed MU down nearly 7% over the day, with all liquidations coming from longs and none from shorts.

Coinglass data shows whale positions on Hyperliquid currently stand at $5.263 billion in total. Long positions account for $2.589 billion, or 49.19% of the total, while short positions stand at $2.674 billion, representing 50.81%. On the profit and loss side, long positions are showing losses of $61.0607 million, and short positions are down $15.1559 million. The data also highlights one whale address, 0x0ddf..02, which opened a 3x full-position short on ETH at $1,700.06. That position is currently showing an unrealized loss of $10.6227 million. The figures were cited by ChainCatcher based on Coinglass data.

Arkham-tracked wallet 0x4B1 is sitting on a sizable unrealized loss after buying CASHCAT around the time the token landed on Robinhood. According to BlockBeats, the trader spent about $1.29 million to acquire tokens equal to roughly 0.85% of the total supply. The average entry implied a market capitalization of about $150 million at the time of purchase. After CASHCAT went live on Robinhood, the token fell about 30%, leaving the position with an unrealized loss of around $412,000. On-chain data shows the wallet has not sold any of its holdings so far. The trade has drawn attention because of both its size and the decision to keep the position open despite the decline.

A highly leveraged wallet tracked as 0x8c96 has seen part of its Bitcoin short position liquidated after BTC briefly moved above $65,000, according to on-chain monitor Lookonchain. The address had previously held a 1,800 BTC short worth about $117 million. Of that total, 360 BTC, valued at roughly $23.36 million, has already been liquidated. The wallet still holds a 1,440 BTC short position worth about $93.3 million. Lookonchain said the new liquidation price for the remaining position is $65,041.72. The update was cited by BlockBeats on Aug. 18 as Bitcoin briefly traded through the $65,000 level.

Galaxy Research’s review of the second quarter of 2026 points to a broad, orderly reduction in leverage across crypto credit and derivatives rather than the kind of abrupt collapse seen in 2022. Total crypto-collateralized lending across CeFi platforms, DeFi lending apps, and the crypto-backed portion of CDP stablecoins fell by $11.33 billion, or 16.78% quarter over quarter, to $56.16 billion. That left the market down 40.13% from the $78.69 billion peak recorded in Q3 2025. DeFi lending posted the sharpest contraction, falling $7.79 billion, or 27.61%, to $20.43 billion, while CeFi outstanding loans declined 9.62% to $22.98 billion. As a result, CeFi loan books exceeded DeFi lending app balances for the first time since Q3 2023. On the corporate side, Galaxy said debt tied to digital asset treasury strategies stood at $16.1 billion after Strategy completed a $1.5 billion debt repurchase in May. Futures open interest, including perpetuals, slipped only 3.08% in the quarter to $103.2 billion, though BTC and ETH both saw notable declines beneath that relatively stable headline number. By the end of July, total open interest had already rebounded to roughly $114 billion.

Monitoring data from TradingBeats, formerly Hyperinsight, shows that trader 「LucasMeow」 is running a sizable bearish book across platforms. On Hyperliquid, the account holds roughly $15.889 million in combined BTC and ETH short positions, including a 100 BTC short opened with 40x cross leverage and a 5,000 ETH short opened with 25x cross leverage. The two positions are currently showing about $503,000 in unrealized profit while using around $539,000 in margin. On Polymarket, the same trader has deployed about $466,700 across eight prediction positions described as a form of insurance for the shorts. Those include wagers that BTC will not fall into six lower price bands between $15,000 and $45,000 this year, that ETH will not drop to $800, and that Satoshi Nakamoto will not move BTC this year. TradingBeats said the maximum profit from those prediction positions is only about $50,800 even if they all settle in the trader’s favor, despite the capital committed being equal to 86.5% of the current margin used by the shorts. Under a static calculation cited by TradingBeats, if BTC rises to $96,715.7 and ETH rises to $2,542.59, the liquidation impact on the two short positions would total about $5.993 million. The trader also still has two non-reduce-only BTC sell orders at $62,277 and $61,500, intending to add another 125 BTC in shorts worth roughly $7.715 million notionally.

Harvard University’s endowment stopped cutting its Bitcoin ETF exposure in the second quarter of 2026, according to its latest 13F filing cited by The Block. As of June 30, Harvard Management Company held 3,044,612 shares of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), worth about $101.4 million, unchanged from the prior quarter. The move ended two straight quarters of reductions after Harvard trimmed the position by 21% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and by another 43% in the first quarter of 2026. IBIT ranked 11th among Harvard’s 19 disclosed holdings and made up 2.4% of its $4.26 billion reported portfolio. The value of the stake fell by roughly $15.6 million during the quarter because of IBIT’s price decline, not because Harvard sold shares. Harvard’s gold-related holdings were larger, with combined exposure to the iShares Gold Trust and SPDR Gold Trust at about $171.2 million. Other U.S. university funds also mostly stood still in the second quarter. Dartmouth, Brown University and the University of Illinois Foundation all kept their disclosed crypto-related positions unchanged. Outside the university segment, institutional activity was more mixed, with Mubadala and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council holding steady while Morgan Stanley reduced IBIT and JPMorgan increased both its IBIT and BlackRock Ethereum ETF positions.

Jane Street suffered roughly $15 billion in losses in July, according to multiple media reports, a hit that would mark its first monthly loss in about a decade if confirmed. The setback was tied to the collapse of AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness, in which Jane Street had invested, as well as losses on long positions in Asian non-AI stocks and a broader selloff in AI, semiconductor and other technology shares. Internal memos cited by Reuters said some of the firm’s biggest AI-linked holdings, including storage chip and semiconductor names, fell by about 50% in July. Jane Street told staff that many of the losses came from the same basket of trades that had generated strong outperformance in the second quarter. Even after the July drawdown, Bloomberg and Reuters reported that the firm’s net trading revenue for the year still exceeded $40 billion, above its record full-year 2025 figure of $39.6 billion. The losses surfaced as Jane Street was also working on a roughly $14.6 billion refinancing led by JPMorgan, with Pimco, Capital Group and Fidelity participating. The deal would replace parts of its public-market debt with private financing, a shift the Financial Times said reflects the firm’s willingness to accept higher funding costs in exchange for less public disclosure. Jane Street has also said it closed a substantial portion of the exposures that drove the July losses and cut risk in other strategies.