High-profile Whale Identity Revealed for ETH to BTC Switch: Allegedly Former BitForex CEO Garrett Jin

BlockBeats News, October 12th, On-chain detective Eye posted an analysis stating, "An investigation into the identity of the mysterious Hyperliquid whale (holding over 100,000 BTC). Recently, they have sold over $4.23 billion worth of Bitcoin (BTC) in exchange for Ethereum (ETH), and it was indeed them who placed a $735 million Bitcoin short order on the same platform. During August and September, they sold over 35,000 BTC for ETH through a series of Bitcoin wallets via Hyperliquid's spot and perpetual contracts."

They pledged a large amount of ETH, and the staking funds came from wallet 0x1CB7B54AAB4283782b8aF70d07F88AD795c952E9, with the initial funds received by that wallet coming from the BSC chain's ereignis.eth. After the staking contract deployment, the first wallet to interact with it was indeed ereignis.eth, which deposited 32 ETH into the contract.

Further investigation into the ereignis.eth address revealed that it also holds a second ENS domain, garrettjin.eth, corresponding to user X @GarrettBullish. Garrett Jin graduated with a degree in Economics from Boston University in 2008. He interned and worked at the China Construction Bank from 2008 to 2011. In 2012, he founded his first company, Da Yo Trading (HK), operating until 2014. He then entered the crypto industry and served as the COO of Huobi/HTX until 2015. He later moved to Frankfurt, Germany, co-founding FuLang Medical Germany GmbH medical platform but resigned in 2017.

From 2017 to 2020, Garrett served as the CEO of BitForex. The exchange later faced a scandal for alleged fake trading volume and in 2023 was warned by the Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA) for operating without registration. In February 2024, BitForex's hot wallet private key was leaked, about $57 million in assets were transferred out with no reasonable explanation. Subsequently, the website became inaccessible, withdrawals were frozen, and operations were completely suspended. In July of the same year, BitForex claimed the team was under investigation by the police in Jiangsu, China, and planned to only allow KYC-verified users to withdraw funds, suspending all trading and deposits for a "thorough rectification."

The whale's large Bitcoin holdings were mostly withdrawn from exchanges such as HTX, OKX, ViaBTC, Bixin, and Binance 7-8 years ago, forming a suspicious link to his past involvement in the Huobi and BitForex incidents. Garrett is also the founder of @XHash_com (since 2024), a platform that provides non-custodial ETH staking services for institutions.

Currently, Garrett's address still holds 46,295 BTC (valued at approximately $5.19 billion at current prices).