Andrew Tate’s Hyperliquid Meltdown: How $727K Turned Into Zero

The meltdown — what actually happened

Short version: a big stack, big leverage, and a stubborn refusal to fold turned roughly $727,000 into a neat zero on an on-chain perpetuals platform. Over the past year the account took a beating from one leveraged liquidation after another until, on Nov. 18, the balance hit empty and the show was over.

The account’s roller-coaster started showing up on-chain late last year. The first big cluster of forced closes landed on Dec. 19, 2024, when a bunch of long positions across the market were tombstoned at once. That early pattern stuck: lots of directional bets, very high leverage, and little evidence of sensible stop-loss behavior.

There were dramatic moments along the way. In June, a 25x ETH long posted with a lot of chest-thumping evaporated within hours. Analysts later pointed to a full trade history that included about 76 trades, a win rate in the mid-30s, and cumulative losses in the hundreds of thousands — numbers that explain how a six-figure bankroll can disappear over months rather than minutes.

September brought another headline-sized hit when a long on a smaller token got liquidated for around $67,500, and in mid-November a 40x BTC long blew out for roughly $235,000. The final sequence unfolded on Nov. 18: the last BTC longs got closed near the $90,000 handle and the account was left at zero. From deposit to dust, the on-chain trail shows no withdrawals — just more entries, more margin calls, and more forced closes.

How leverage, bad timing, and stubborn re-entries did the damage

Leverage is a double-edged sword: it makes winners look heroic and losses look catastrophic. A 40x perpetual position needs only a roughly 2.5% move against it to call the whole thing off. With trade sizing and win rate behaving like they did here — roughly a one-in-three success rate — even a few unlucky moves do most of the work for the market.

What sped the decline was a classic gambler’s reflex: re-enter the same trade after a liquidation, often at the same or higher leverage. That’s like patching a leaky boat by poking more holes. Each forced close reduced the stack, but the size and leverage of the next entries stayed aggressive, so the math kept trending toward zero.

There’s also a meta angle: everything was public. The platform settles on-chain, so every order, margin call, and wipeout was visible in real time. Broadcasting trades before they resolved turned a private bankroll into a spectator sport. Blockchain sleuths and trade trackers turned the account into a tick-by-tick case study, which is entertaining for observers and humiliating for the account holder.

One juicy wrinkle: about $75,000 in referral rebates was earned and then pushed back into the same risky positions. Instead of pocketing that bonus or dialing down risk, the rebates were recycled into the action and got liquidated too. That makes the whole episode feel less like bad luck and more like a repeated, predictable design failure of the trading plan.

At the system level, the platform collected fees on every trade and every rescue attempt. The referral program paid out for volume, then the trading losses effectively returned that money to the market. From a product perspective it worked exactly as designed — for an exchange. For the trader, it was a textbook annihilation by leverage.

Takeaways? High leverage without strict position sizing is a fast way to see your balance evaporate. A sub-40% win rate is survivable only if your winners are big in relation to losers and your risk per trade is small. Re-entering the same losing strategy at equal or higher leverage is the financial equivalent of shouting “hold my beer” while standing on a cliff.

The on-chain nature of modern derivatives means these stories are now open-source lessons: they can educate, entertain, and warn. The ledger remembers every misstep, and anyone can replay the cascade. So if you like drama and math in equal measure, this one had both — but if you trade, maybe let someone else be the cautionary tale.