Machi Big Brother Sells 3 Bored Apes, Slashes 52% ETH Long

Quick recap: the short, weird version

In plain (and slightly dramatic) terms: an account tied to the name Machi Big Brother sold three Bored Apes to raise cash and drastically slimmed down a leveraged Ethereum long. Over the last month the long position was chopped roughly in half, but the safety buffer barely budged — the market was hovering only about $22 away from the account’s reported liquidation level at one snapshot.

Here’s the meat: an exchange snapshot showed a 2,500 ETH long using roughly 25x leverage, with a liquidation price around $1,859. The live midpoint price at nearly the same moment was about $1,882, leaving an indicative $22 gap — only about a 1.2% cushion. Back on July 14 the same account held about 5,264 ETH, so by mid-August the exposure was roughly 50% smaller.

There were notable shrinkages in late July too: a cluster of sell orders closed 700, 560, and 448 ETH in one afternoon (1,708 ETH total), which realized roughly $96k in negative closed PnL. The account’s liquidation threshold actually moved higher as the long got smaller, which is the sort of head-scratching math traders love to mute-button.

Why this still looks sketchy (and why NFT sales aren’t a magical fix)

Selling NFTs to raise cash sounds smart on paper — cash in, margin up, problem solved. In reality it’s messier. An NFT only turns into usable fungible value the moment a buyer pays and the funds clear. Public traces show the sales and the timing, but they don’t prove a neat, immediate rescue of the leveraged position.

Details from the tracker paint a clear timeline: multiple NFT sales with chunky ETH losses (individual Bored Ape sales listed in public posts showed multi-ETH losses on each), big ETH position cuts across July and August, and a liquidation price that bounced around instead of drifting neatly downward with position size. At one point the account’s liquidation price rose by about $100 from mid-July levels even as the long shrank — which tells you equity was being eaten faster than exposure was being trimmed.

Put another way: converting collectibles to cash doesn’t instantly convert risk to safety. The account ended up with a 2,500 ETH long and only a hair’s-breadth between spot and liquidation in that snapshot. Markets move instantly; fills, midpoint quotes, and account equity keep changing. That $22 buffer was the kind of thing that makes traders reach for a stress ball.

Bottom line: this is a live example of how leveraged betting plus illiquid asset sales can still leave you perilously close to the edge. Selling three Bored Apes trimmed exposure and locked in losses, but it didn’t create a comfortable margin cushion. If anything, it’s a reminder that NFTs are great for flexing on socials — not always great for patching margin holes in real time.