A wallet known on-chain as pension-usdt.eth, which had built a reputation as one of the most consistent short sellers in crypto with 23 consecutive winning trades, was wiped out for roughly $49 million on August 19 as Ethereum's price tore through its short position. The trader had been leaning on the same playbook that made the streak: opening leveraged shorts against ETH and closing them for profit as the price cooperated. This time it didn't.
Ethereum broke through a string of moving averages at $1,875, $1,935 and $2,125 in quick succession, briefly touching above $2,300 before settling near $2,250. On-chain tracker Lookonchain had flagged the wallet's position days earlier, when it opened a fresh 3x short on 27,450 ETH worth roughly $47.6 million — the trade that ultimately erased the streak.
A Squeeze That Caught the Whole Market Short
The move wasn't isolated to one wallet. Roughly $2.99 billion in crypto positions were liquidated across 172,000 traders in 24 hours, and the damage was overwhelmingly one-sided: $2.74 billion of that, or 91%, came from short positions being forced closed, against just $256.5 million in longs. Ethereum accounted for $1.13 billion of the total liquidations, second only to bitcoin's $1.42 billion, as traders who had bet on continued weakness were run over by the reversal.
Technically, the rally pushed Ethereum deep into overbought territory — the daily RSI moved above 80, with shorter-timeframe readings climbing even further into the 85-90 range. That's often a signal of an unsustainable near-term move, but it did nothing to stop shorts from getting squeezed in the meantime; overbought conditions can persist, and stay painful for anyone positioned against the trend, right up until they don't.
Why the Streak Ended When It Did
Pension-usdt.eth's shorts had worked repeatedly in a market that spent much of the year grinding lower or sideways, and the wallet had scaled its size accordingly — prior positions on the same account had ranged from tens of millions up to an $85 million short opened near $1,700.
Related: Bitcoin's 8.7% Surge to $69,749 Sends $1.44B in Shorts Into Liquidation
That sizing is exactly what turned a sharp reversal into a nine-figure swing: the same leverage that magnified 23 straight wins magnified one loss enough to erase a meaningful share of the accumulated gains in a single session, a pattern crypto derivatives desks describe as the asymmetric risk of staying leveraged and short into a market that can turn in minutes rather than days.
The episode is a reminder that on-chain leaderboards reward discipline until the one trade that breaks the pattern — and in a market where a single Treasury policy announcement can move Ethereum 18% in a day, no streak is immune from it.
