On-chain investigation reveals: The whale suspected of manipulating the price of POPCAT is BTX Capital, arbitrage model exposed.

The decentralized perpetual futures trading platform Hyperliquid (HL) has once again been embroiled in a market manipulation storm. A comprehensive investigation published by on-chain analyst Specter indicates that the crypto investment firm BTX Capital and its founder Vanessa Cao are suspected of being the masterminds behind several recent price manipulation incidents involving small tokens, including the $POPCAT attack event that drew attention this week.

26 wallet stacking 25 million USD buy wall after withdrawal orders, causing large-scale liquidation

Investigations show that related wallet organizations are using fake buy orders on Hyperliquid to create false demand, forcing the market into a series of liquidations, while simultaneously establishing short positions on centralized exchange (CEX) to profit from the crash. According to on-chain analysis, around 16:00 UTC on November 12, at least 26 wallets placed buy orders for approximately $25 million POPCAT (price around $0.21) on Hyperliquid. The goal was to create strong market demand, prompting bulls to leverage their positions. The buy orders were later completely withdrawn, triggering a chain liquidation wave.

Hyperliquid's official data shows that the attacker incurred a loss of about 4 million USD in margin, and HLP lost about 4.9 million USD. This means that the overall behavior of the attacker is a planned action ready to burn money, supported by larger-scale arbitrage positions. Specter pointed out that the only reason the attacker could bear such losses is that they established a large short position on POPCAT with a huge amount of funds on centralized exchanges.

On-chain tracking: The same group of people previously manipulated TST, with multiple funding sources pointing directly to BTX Capital.

The investigation links the recent POPCAT manipulation incident with the TST manipulation case from August, with core evidence including:

Repeatedly occurring main wallet: 0x0A11…773C3: used to manipulate the token $TST in August this year, and this time the POPCAT incident is used to fund 7 wallets.

A large amount of funds comes from CEXes such as OKX and Bybit. This includes: millions of USDT connected through the OKX deposit and withdrawal wallet, multiple funds transferred from addresses like 0x01c8 and 0xbBf4 into the same chain, another 50M AKI Token from a Polygon multi-signature, and finally connected to the 0xf97 wallet.

Key clues: 0xf97 is associated with the wallet of BTX Capital founder. Investigations indicate that 0xf97 on Ethereum has received funds from vanessacao.eth (, the publicly available wallet of the BTX Capital founder ). The same wallet on Polygon also provided POL Gas for the BTX Capital wallet, linking these two cross-chain transfers directly to BTX Capital.

BTX Capital describes itself on its official website as “a cryptocurrency investment trading company focusing on liquid token strategies” and was established in 2019. The founder, Vanessa Cao, is a former co-founder of JRR Crypto and has served as a managing partner at a hedge fund, previously working at Sequoia Capital China. She studied at Shanghai International Studies University and holds an MBA from Tsinghua University. Analysts point out: “Given the enormous capital scale they control, it is not difficult to understand why they can easily manipulate the price of Hyperliquid. Perhaps this is what they refer to as 'strategy'.”

Arbitrage model: Hyperliquid manipulates spot, CEX opens positions

pecter stated that BTX Capital is likely involved in the manipulation of several recent “graphical anomaly” tokens, including:

$ZEREBRO

$JELLYJELLY

$HIFI

The Hyperliquid community has recently seen a repeated pattern of “instant massive buy walls → sudden order cancellation → liquidation,” which perfectly matches the description of this investigation. The survey points out that BTX's profit model is extremely simple, yet highly destructive:

Manipulating prices on Hyperliquid, stacking massive buy walls to create FOMO, enticing retail and short-term traders to enter with leverage, and then canceling orders to cause a market crash.

Establishing a reverse position on centralized exchanges (such as OKX, Bybit, etc.): HL prices fluctuate dramatically, while the relatively stable futures market on CEX allows attackers to earn huge profits.

Retail investors have become the main victims of HL's HLP.

Analysts refer to it as: “a low-cost, highly destructive cross-platform arbitrage strategy”

This article on-chain investigation reveals: Hyperliquid manipulation of POPCAT price giant whale is suspected to be BTX Capital, arbitrage model exposed first appeared in chain news ABMedia.