How to track Hyperliquid whales: a step-by-step guide
Hyperliquid is an on-chain perpetuals exchange: every open position, its size, entry price and liquidation price are public. That makes it one of the few places where you can see what large traders are actually doing rather than what they say on social media. The problem is volume — thousands of active addresses and a constant stream of trades. This guide shows how to cut through it.
Who counts as a whale
HyperScan treats an address as a whale when its open perpetual positions add up to $10M or more — longs and shorts across all coins at the current mark price. To avoid flickering around the threshold, an address stays a whale until its positions drop below $5M. Addresses from $2.5M are watched, so we notice the moment they grow into whales.
New whales are found within seconds: the site reads every trade on the exchange, and any order of $100K+ puts its address on the radar. The details are in the methodology.
Step 1. Check the overall picture
Start with the overview. It shows how whale money is split between longs and shorts right now, how much whales bought and sold over the last 24 hours, how many positions sit within 5% of liquidation, and in which coins whales hold the most. This answers the first question: is large money leaning long or short, and is it adding or cutting?
Step 2. Separate bets from hedges
Not every large short is bearish. A fund that holds spot BTC elsewhere and shorts it on Hyperliquid has no view on price at all, and a market maker’s position is just inventory left from serving other traders. That is why HyperScan sorts every whale into a type — directional, hedged, basket, MM / HFT or vault — and by default counts only directional whales, the ones whose positions look like a real bet. Switch to “All whales” when you want the full picture of risk: a hedge can still be liquidated.
Step 3. Drill into a coin
Every coin has its own page — for example BTC, ETH or HYPE. There you will find every whale position with size, entry, PnL, leverage and distance to liquidation, the latest whale moves and large orders, a price chart with alert markers and a liquidation map. Sort positions by distance to liquidation to see who is under pressure.
Step 4. Study a whale before trusting it
The whale list can be sorted by position size, leverage and PnL. Open any whale to see its open positions, closed trades and every change in its positions. A few things worth checking:
- Win rate and profit factor. Win rate is shown from 10 closed trades. Look at profit factor too: a high win rate with one huge loss can still be a losing strategy.
- Effective leverage. A 40× setting often hides only 5× of real leverage across the account, and the other way round.
- Type. A “basket” or “MM / HFT” label means the positions are probably not a directional view.
Step 5. Follow whales and get alerts
Create a free account and star the whales you want to follow. Their moves appear in your personal notifications and as markers on coin charts, and a tracked address stays under watch even when its positions are smaller than a whale’s. The public alerts page covers the whole market: anomalously large orders, strong whale consensus and its breakdown, and high squeeze risk.
What to keep in mind
- Only Hyperliquid is visible. Hedges on other exchanges and spot holdings elsewhere are not.
- One trader can split positions across several addresses; each address is treated separately.
- Positions refresh with a delay from a few seconds to several minutes.
- Whales are wrong too. Their positions are information, not a signal to copy — and nothing here is investment advice.