Do Top Traders Get Liquidated? — We Went Through a Week of Fills for 174 Top Hyperliquid Accounts

Reading the Index — analysis pieces that read the Satoshi Index numbers one angle at a time. This one is not a screen number. It is a count we made ourselves from the Hyperliquid public API at 16:31 KST on October 26, 2026, over the past 7 days of fills for 174 top accounts. Other exchanges were not counted.

In the liquidation map column we wrote that the screen only shows where positions would be liquidated. So how do you find out whether they were? Exchange fill histories flag fills that resulted from a liquidation, and Hyperliquid exposes that flag through its public API. We took the Hyperliquid accounts in the 24-hour and 1-week top 100, 174 accounts combined, pulled every fill from the past seven days and kept only those with the flag.

At a glance

• The liquidation map shows where positions would be liquidated, not whether they were, so we pulled seven days of fills for 174 top Hyperliquid accounts and counted.
• 11 accounts had liquidation fills: 759 fills, $22.7M, of which $21.9M was one account's ETH short on October 19–20. That account is back at 9th place in today's 24-hour ranking. ETH was the only coin whose map bars were actually reached that week.
• These numbers are not on any Satoshi Note screen, and a recount by the same method will differ from day to day. No forecast, no recommendation.

11 of 174, 759 fills, $22.7M

Eleven of the 174 accounts were liquidated at least once in the week, about one in sixteen. $22.7M is not small, but it is small next to what these accounts hold now ($787M of BTC shorts alone). For top accounts, liquidation is closer to "occasional" than "routine." At least it was this week.

$21.9M is one account over two days

Of the week's $22.7M, $22.0M fell on October 19 and 20, and almost all of it ($21.85M, 500 fills) is one account's ETH short. From 16:34 on October 19 to 23:15 on October 20, the short was bought back by force 500 times between $2,426 and $2,473. ETH's daily close went from $2,407 on the 19th to $2,473 on the 21st. The short went underwater, price rose into the liquidation level, and instead of closing in one hit it was shaved off piece by piece for a day and a half. Realized PnL on those fills: −$0.74M.

And that account sits at 9th in today's (October 26) Hyperliquid 24-hour ROI ranking. An account that had $21.85M of short liquidated a week ago is back in the top 10. The liquidation did not end it.

The other ten accounts' liquidations total $0.85M. The coins are the notable part. BTC $0.18M (one account, alongside ZEC and LTC on October 24–25), and otherwise PLTR $0.20M, MINIMAX $0.13M, MSTR $0.11M, and a few tens of thousands each in SPCX, CBRS, RIVN, KR200, SNDK and WDC. Tokenised US stocks. From October 21 on, nearly every top-account liquidation was a small position in a tokenised stock. The large crypto positions were not liquidated this week.

Four things to know before you count

These numbers carry more caveats than a screen number.

1. Survivors only. The 174 are the accounts in today's ranking. An account that was top 100 a week ago, got liquidated and dropped out is not in the list. So "only 6% of top accounts were liquidated" may be lower than the truth. We only see accounts that, like the ETH one, stayed in the ranking after being liquidated.
2. 2,000-fill cap. The Hyperliquid API returns at most 2,000 fills per call. 60 of the 174 accounts had more than 2,000 fills in the week and were truncated; any older liquidation of theirs is unseen.
3. Hyperliquid only. Lighter, dYdX and Pacifica were not counted. Since 93% of the Satoshi Index's BTC short notional is on Hyperliquid, this is the biggest piece, but not the whole.
4. ADL separately. The 40 auto-deleveraging fills (where the exchange forcibly reduces a profitable position on the other side) were counted apart from liquidations, and their notional is not in the totals.

So, the answer

For this week, the answer to "do top traders get liquidated?" is: yes, rarely, and once, large. Eleven of 174 accounts, with 96% of the money being one account's ETH short over two days. The rest, small positions in tokenised stocks. And that ETH account is 9th again today. The bars stacked on the liquidation map really do get cut like this when price reaches them. But in the past week the only coin where price reached them was ETH; the big shorts in BTC, SOL, HYPE and ZEC are still standing.

FAQ

Do top traders actually get liquidated?

Yes. Counting a week of fills for 174 top Hyperliquid accounts gave 11 accounts with liquidation fills, 759 fills and $22.7M. But $21.9M of that was a single ETH short, so it should not be read as widespread liquidation.

Did the liquidation map bars turn into real liquidations?

Only in ETH that week. The map is a snapshot of current positions' liquidation prices; a liquidation happens only if price travels there, and if it does not, the bar simply disappears.

Can I see these numbers on Satoshi Note?

No. They come from counting fills one by one and are not on any screen. Each account's fills are on its trader profile (satoshinote.io/traders/<address>), and the liquidation map is under Settings › Tools (beta).

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This is an analysis column written by the Satoshi Note team from exchange public data we pulled ourselves. It does not forecast price or recommend any position. No account is identified. The counting method and its limits are in "Four things to know before you count." These numbers are not on any screen, and a recount by the same method will differ from day to day.