Key Takeaways
- Garret Jin has been identified as the whale who placed a $735 million short position on Bitcoin right before the market crashed.
- The timing of the short trade has raised suspicions of insider trading.
- Jin has denied allegations of wrongdoing.
Half an hour before Donald Trump crashed the market on Friday, Oct. 10, with his threat to impose additional tariffs on China, a crypto whale opened a $735 million short position on Bitcoin via Hyperliquid, prompting speculation that they had inside knowledge.
Online sleuths identified the suspicious whale as Garret Jin, a Hong Kong businessman who founded the now-defunct crypto exchange, BitForex.
BitForex Founder Tied to $735 Million BTC Short
As BTC crashed from $68,000 to under $60,000 in the wake of Trump’s tariff threat, one whale’s timely short position earned around $150 million.
In an X thread on Saturday, Oct. 11, a user known as EyeOnChain traced the Bitcoin address behind the short position to Jin by linking previous transactions to the ENS domain garrettjin.eth.
A Hong Kong crypto veteran, Jin is most known as the founder of BitForex, which shut down in 2024 after around $56 million in customer deposits vanished.
While Jin had moved on by the time BitForex shut down, other senior executives were detained and questioned by Chinese authorities, but were ultimately released without being charged of any crimes.
Post-BitForex, Jin founded a string of crypto ventures, including WaveLabs VC, TanglePay, and GroupFi Protocol. His latest project is the institutional Ethereum staking platform, XHash.
CZ Amplifies Accusations
Had EyeOnChain’s post only been seen by the few thousand X users that follow the account, Jin’s whale activity might have remained largely under the radar. But the post reached a much larger audience after it was shared by Binance founder CZ, who has over 10 million followers.
Responding to CZ’s post, Jin wrote: “Thanks for sharing my personal and private information. To clarify, I have no connection with the Trump family or @DonaldJTrumpJr — this isn’t insider trading.”
In another post, Jin claimed that crypto used to fund the short position was not his own, but belonged to clients.
Moreover, he made the case that the trade wasn’t informed by inside knowledge, but was the result of careful economic analysis.
Jin Denies Insider Trading, Claims Market Smarts Informed Short Trade
In the run-up to Friday’s crash, large-cap cryptocurrencies and major tech stocks displayed “overbought signals,” Jin argued. He pointed out that previous bullishness had ignored the reality of rising U.S.-China trade tensions, which were escalating for days ahead of Trump’s tariff threat.
“We cannot predict when President Trump may retaliate against China, but our internal quantitative system has already raised risk alerts,” he said.
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James Morales is CCN’s blockchain and crypto policy reporter. He has been working in the news media since 2020, writing about topics such as payments, banking and financial technology. These days, he likes to explore the latest blockchain innovations and the evolving landscape of global crypto regulation.
With an educational background in social anthropology and media studies, James uses his platform as a journalist to explore how new technologies work, why they matter and how they might shape our future.
