🚨 Let's eat the complete melon丨Hyperliquid XPL explosion event complete timeline and some thoughts - The most sensational thing this morning was another malignant XPL short squeeze on the @HyperliquidX, and many 1X hedging accounts were zeroed; Through a well-planned operation, the whale pulled the price of $XPL from $0.60 to $1.80 in just a few minutes, triggering a massive liquidation and causing a liquidation loss of approximately $25M, while the operator made a profit of over $46M. 1⃣ Preliminary preparation stage (August 24-26): 4 addresses and multiple parties collaborate to build positions Address 0xb9c... 6801e used 11 million USDT to go long on 31.75 million XPL at an average price of $0.56, with an address of 0xe41 in the same period... 858c7、0x006… 2a78f、0x894… 00779 is buying long positions in batches around $0.56. 2⃣ Core Explosion Stage (August 27) 05:35, huge injection of funds at $0.6 - whale 0xb9c0 deposit 16M USDC into the Hyperliquid margin account. At 05:37, a large order was swept, and the price was $0.6 - about 3M XPL was bought, emptying the entire seller's order book, and the trading volume exceeded $5M in 2 minutes. At 05:39, the price skyrocketed to $1.8 - up 200% in just 120 seconds, triggering the forced liquidation of all high-leverage shorts, and the biggest victim 0xc2cb... edf9 was liquidated by $7M in a single transaction, and the total liquidation of XPL on all platforms was about $25M. 05:45, price fluctuates, $1.5-1.65 - automated market makers requote, new bears enter. 05:50-06:21, whales begin to take profits, $1.3-1.4 - the main whale begins to sell about half of their positions, realizing a profit of $14M-16M, and the three collaborative whale wallets make a combined profit of about $38M in the first hour. 3⃣ What problem does this vicious manipulation incident reflect? I think it reflects the short-term failure of HY's liquidity governance to a certain extent. The whale's operation did not hack or exploit technical vulnerabilities, essentially using "legitimate transactions" to achieve "malicious results". Assets like $XPL have a market depth of several millions and cannot withstand the impact of tens of millions of funds. As a result, as long as the whale is patient to ambush, it can instantly smash into tens of millions of chips to clear the order book and create "compliant" violent manipulation. After the last Jelly incident, Hyperliquid has introduced OI limits and liquidation logic optimizations, but this time it was still bypassed, indicating that patched governance is always lagging behind attack methods. The institutional dilemma facing Perps DEX now: If completely laissez-faire, whales can dominate the market, and retail investors can infinitely amplify risks; If it is completely bottom-up and deviates from the spirit of decentralization, it is not much different from CEX. In the short term, more risk control measures may continue to be introduced, such as dynamic thresholds, circuit breaker mechanisms, emergency pauses, or attempts to depersonalize interventions and hand them over to DAOs or transparent governance logic to avoid single discretion. In the long run, I think the future Perps DEX is very likely to be divided into two levels of the market - Retail investor protection layer: limited and limited risk control to ensure the safety of positions and to do Taobao with peace of mind; Free competition layer: There are almost no restrictions, allowing large players and institutions to play freely. The ultimate pattern is likely not a fully DeFi-oriented utopia, but closer to an on-chain hybrid market order, and I wonder if there will be a new DEX that will break this pattern.