The biggest traders on Hyperliquid have been quietly building long bitcoin positions for two months, and the chart is finally moving their way.
Bitcoin sits near $78,000, up from the mid-$60,000s back in February, while funding rates on perpetual futures, the cost shorts pay longs, have been negative for around 47 days straight. That setup is what short squeezes are built on.
Glassnode data shows whale positioning on Hyperliquid, the onchain perpetual futures exchange that has become the venue of choice for size, flipped from net short to net long in early March, with the long bias growing every week since.
Hyperliquid whales tend to lead spot bitcoin moves by days to weeks. Their flip in early March came right before bitcoin's run from the mid-$60,000s up to roughly $80,000 earlier this week.
The position now sits at the most aggressively long level ever recorded in the dataset. In English: the people with the best track record of being early are the most long they have ever been.
Perpetual swap funding is the fee that keeps perp futures pegged to spot prices, and negative funding means shorts are paying longs to hold their positions.
Across major exchanges, that rate sits at -0.13% on a seven-day basis, per Coinglass. Forty-seven days of negative funding is one of the longest stretches of bearish positioning on record, with a lot of traders betting against bitcoin and paying for the privilege.
The technical setup that produces a short squeeze has three pieces: a wall of shorts on one side, aggressive whale longs on the other, and a price that breaks higher.
All three pieces are in place right now, which is why the bitcoin tape this week is worth watching closely.
The S&P 500 closed at a record on Friday while Treasury yields dropped after the DOJ closed its Powell probe, and Iran-U.S. talks fell apart over the weekend.
Macro is loud right now, and crypto is rarely insulated from it. The whales already placed their bet.
