Trader Turns $87M Profit to Dust in 5 Days on Hyperliquid

Hi! In today’s edition:

• 🎢 An $87M joyride ends in tears

• 🥶 Circle freezes LIBRA-linked funds

• 🏦 Pakistan to join Bitcoin reservists

• 🧨 Cork Protocol gets wrecked in flash heist

Hyperliquid Trader Makes $87M in 70 Days, Loses It In Five

James Wynn, a well-known crypto trader, recently made impressive gains on decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, generating a profit of more than $87 million within 70 days through aggressive, high-leverage trading strategies.

But Wynn lost nearly all of his gains in just five days, with his portfolio plummeting between May 23 and May 28, according to an X post by analytics firm Lookonchain.

Wynn’s trading activity was public and high-profile, and he used significant leverage of up to 40x on large positions, particularly in bitcoin and memecoins such as PEPE, TRUMP, and FARTCOIN.

Wynn’s account now retains only about $13 of profit from his original base, with an existing 40x leveraged $529 million bitcoin position standing at an unrealized loss of $2.1 million.

Circle Freezes $57M of USDC Linked to Libra Scandal

Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, has frozen around $57 million of USDC in Solana wallets associated with the team behind Argentina’s pump-and-dump LIBRA token.

Circle took the step in response to a Argentinian court order amid ongoing legal disputes and following steep investor losses after the LIBRA token’s collapse. The order came from Judge Sandra Arroyo Salgado at the request of victim and investor Martin Romeo, who is suing the LIBRA team.

The freeze targeted two main Solana addresses tagged as "Libra" and "Libra Deployer," which hold $44 million and $13 million of USDC, respectively.

Circle has the authority to freeze USDC on all supported blockchains, including Solana, by design. The latest freeze is one of the biggest the stablecoin issuer has executed to date.

Circle has blacklisted a total of $98.3 million of USDC across 292 wallet addresses, according to data compiled by pseudonymous analyst @phabc on Dune Analytics. 

Pakistan Sets up Strategic Bitcoin Reserve

Pakistan has announced plans to establish a government-led strategic Bitcoin reserve, marking a major shift in its approach to crypto.

The announcement was made by Bilal Bin Saqib, head of the country’s Crypto Council and special assistant to the prime minister on blockchain and crypto, at the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas.

The strategic Bitcoin reserve will be managed by the government and is intended as a long-term holding, not for speculation or trading. Officials also emphasized that the bitcoins in the reserve would "never, ever be sold.”

The government has allocated 2,000 megawatts of electricity for Bitcoin mining and artificial intelligence data centers, aimed at attracting miners and infrastructure players to Pakistan.

Cork Protocol Theft Costs It $12M

DeFi platform Cork Protocol has suffered a major security breach due to a smart contract exploit, resulting in the theft of around $12 million of digital assets.

Blockchain security firm SlowMist first flagged the exploit, which was later confirmed by Cork Protocol founder Phil Fogel on X.

Cork Protocol has paused all smart contracts and trading on the platform as a precautionary measure as it investigates the breach.

The attacker appears to have targeted the wstETH:weETH trading pair, draining about 3,761 Wrapped Staked Ether (wstETH) from the protocol’s liquidity pool in just 17 minutes, according to analysis by blockchain security firm Cyvers.

The stolen wstETH was then rapidly converted into ETH, making the funds difficult to trace.

“Fake tokens were used to manipulate the exchange rate which led to the exploit,” said CD Security founder and smart contract researcher Dimitar Dimitrov. “Unfortunately, 4 audits (2 of which were contests) were not enough to discover the vulnerability.”

• 🌐 A U.S. trade court on Wednesday struck down the Trump administration’s sweeping global tariffs as unconstitutional under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, dealing a major blow to its invocation of emergency powers to upend international trade patterns and prompting an immediate appeal from the White House.

• 🧾 BlackRock plans to buy around 10% of Circle’s IPO shares, which are being sold mostly by insiders, including CEO Jeremy Allaire, marking a deepened partnership after managing part of USDC’s reserves and co-developing infrastructure for tokenized treasuries.

• 🇺🇸 White House “Crypto Czar” David Sacks says the government could expand its Strategic Bitcoin Reserve beyond seized holdings using budget-neutral methods such as reallocated surpluses or gold revaluation, pending approval from Treasury or Commerce officials.

• 🗣️ U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, speaking at the Bitcoin 2025 conference on Wednesday, backed a crypto-friendly market structure bill and pledged that the second Trump administration would fire anti-crypto regulators, while emphasizing the economic risks of delaying regulatory clarity for the industry.

• 🤝 TON fell after Elon Musk denied that Telegram and xAI had finalized a deal to bring AI chatbot Grok to the messaging platform, hours after Telegram’s CEO announced a supposed agreement that briefly sent the token 14% higher.

• 🔁 Lending platform Euler is launching EulerSwap, a Uniswap v4-compatible decentralized exchange that channels liquidity provider funds into lending vaults for higher yields and capital efficiency, offering customizable pools and strategies such as delta-neutral- and stableswap-style setups.

• ⚖️ The U.S. Labor Department reversed its 2022 crypto-in-401(k) caution on Wednesday, with Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer criticizing Biden-era restrictions and reaffirming that fiduciaries, not federal agencies, should determine retirement investment strategies.

• 🎮 GameStop added 4,710 BTC — worth about $500 million at the time — to its corporate treasury after raising $1.5 billion via convertible notes in April, formalizing its March decision to adopt bitcoin as a reserve asset.

• 💵 Conduit closed a $36 million funding round led by Dragonfly and Altos Ventures to grow its stablecoin-powered cross-border payments platform, claiming more than $55 million in client fee savings and announcing plans to expand across Asia and Latin America.

• 👑 Nasdaq-listed VivoPower raised $121 million — $100 million of which came from Saudi Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud — to build an XRP-based treasury strategy, making it the first public company to prioritize XRP over Bitcoin or Ethereum.

• 💼 Metalayer Ventures, started by ex-Two Sigma and Chainlink executives, launched a $25 million fund for early-stage onchain startups, aiming to write up to 30 checks of between $500,000 and $1 million, guided by a proprietary data platform.

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