The apes bought back then are now at a 90% loss in ETH terms!<(MISSING)/blockquote>

Written by: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

On June 27, Lookonchain monitoring showed that Taiwanese crypto whale Huang Licheng (Machi Big Brother) sold 34 Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs in the past month, receiving 326 ETH (approximately $514,000), with an actual loss of 399 ETH (approximately $631,000).

Among them, Bored Ape #6057 was purchased four years ago for 76.84 ETH and sold now for 7.65 ETH, a 90% loss in ETH terms! On-chain data shows that all of this ETH was transferred to Hyperliquid to supplement the margin for his ETH long positions.

BAYC Becomes the Last Lifeline

The reason Huang Licheng is selling apes is that the margin in his contract account can no longer hold.

He started going long on ETH on Hyperliquid in September 2025, when ETH was priced at around $4,700, with typical leverage of 25 to 40 times. The strategy performed well initially; from late 2025 to early 2026, his account recorded a paper profit of $45.66 million at one point, earning him the new title of "On-chain Whale Trader" in the crypto community.

However, ETH subsequently plummeted to the $1,600 range, wiping out all paper profits and turning them into huge actual losses. According to HyperInsight data, as of June 26, Huang Licheng's cumulative losses on Hyperliquid have reached $33.85 million. If calculated based on total trading profits and losses over the past year, his loss scale has exceeded $80 million.

What's more telling is the frequency of liquidations: as of March 2026, Huang Licheng had been liquidated more than 335 times, earning him the community title of "King of Liquidations". Liquidations continued afterward: on June 8, he was liquidated 10 times in 8 hours, leaving his account with only about $52,000 at one point; on June 23, when ETH fell to $1,607, he was liquidated another 7 times in 10 hours. His account balance has repeatedly dropped to extreme levels of a few thousand dollars—once only $8,500 in February—but he recharges and continues to go long every time after nearly zeroing out.

On-chain data platform Arkham specifically noted on June 6 that it was the first time Huang Licheng "did not immediately add margin after being liquidated", sparking community speculation about whether this high-stakes gamble was coming to an end. However, just two days later, he deposited funds again and reopened ETH long positions.

When regular funding sources were exhausted, Huang Licheng began to draw from his NFT collection. Previously, he held about 150 BAYCs, but at the current floor price (about 8.8 ETH), the total value of the remaining NFTs is around $1.6 million, barely enough to support the margin for a few rounds of high-leverage positions. In an interview at the end of 2025, he said he would "hold on through $30 million in losses without selling" and was firmly bullish on ETH. Half a year later, losses have long exceeded that figure, and his once multi-million-dollar blue-chip NFT collection has become a lifeline for his contract account.

On June 26, he posted on X: "We're going to need more Tom. 8 percent.（我们需要更多的汤姆。8%!）(MISSING)" which is suspected to be a call to Tom Lee to rescue the market.

From Ape Godfather to King of Liquidations

Looking back at Huang Licheng's crypto journey, his starting point was far from that of an ordinary retail investor. Huang Licheng is a founding member of L.A. Boyz, a pioneer in Chinese hip-hop. The live streaming platform 17 Media (M17) he founded in 2015 once became one of the largest live streaming apps in Asia. He got into cryptocurrencies during the 2017 bull market and met Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin at a Taiwan blockchain conference the same year. In 2020, he co-founded the DeFi protocol Cream Finance, which later suffered three security vulnerability attacks with cumulative losses exceeding $192 million.

What truly made him famous in the crypto community was NFTs. During the 2021 bull market, Huang Licheng obtained dozens of BAYCs at a mint price of only 0.08 ETH, then went on a buying spree. At his peak, he held about 200 BAYCs and over 100 MAYCs, with a total of about 3,200 NFTs in his wallet, worth over $40 million.

He gifted BAYCs to top Chinese-speaking stars like Jay Chou, single-handedly promoting the viral spread of Bored Apes in the Asian market, earning him the community title of "Ape Godfather". That was an era when BAYC's floor price soared from 0.08 ETH to over 100 ETH, and Huang Licheng's ape holdings were once worth tens of millions of dollars.

But after 2023, the NFT market cooled rapidly. Huang Licheng bought a large number of blue-chip NFTs during Blur's airdrop mining campaign, sweeping up 71 BAYCs and 77 CryptoPunks in two days, suffering heavy losses. He announced his exit from the NFT market in April that year. He briefly returned in July 2024, buying another 23 BAYCs in two weeks, but lost over $20 million in four months. Since then, his attention has fully shifted to Hyperliquid's perpetual contracts, starting the cycle of high-leverage ETH long positions that continues to this day.

From a mint price of 0.08 ETH to a peak of over 100 ETH, then to the current selling price of 7 to 10 ETH, BAYC's price curve itself is the most complete footnote to the NFT cycle. Huang Licheng's personal trajectory highly overlaps with this curve: NFTs made him the "Ape Godfather" and provided the initial capital for his subsequent continuous betting on the contract table. Now the apes are being sold one by one, converted into ETH, into margin, and then into the next liquidation notice.