What the numbers measure.

Source

Positions, fills, transfers and prices come from the Hyperliquid blockchain. For each open position we read its side, size, leverage, entry price, unrealised PnL (the profit or loss while it is open) and the liquidation price the exchange sets. HIP-3 markets, run by builder exchanges on Hyperliquid, are read the same way. We add no estimates of our own to these values. Every page says when its data was read, and every liquidation and close links its proof on the official Hyperliquid explorer.

How to use this data, and where it stops

People use WhaleRadar as context: for a market recap, a risk note, checking a viral post about a whale, research and backtests with the Desk datasets, or a look at the market before their own decision to trade or invest. The data describes what the largest wallets hold and what they did. It never tells you what to do.

• Descriptive, not a forecast. A lean, a wall or a Tide reading is a fact about positions at one moment. Whales can be wrong, hedged elsewhere or about to change their minds.
• Every number has its time. Positions are current for everyone. Free readers see moves later, as Timing says, and a delayed move is never shown as live.
• A whale is a wallet, not a person. It is one of the largest accounts on Hyperliquid, holding a position of $1M or more. Its name comes from WhaleRadar, and what it holds elsewhere stays unseen.
• Unknown is not zero. Where there is no reading, you see a label instead: “too few whales” for a Tide, “unclassified” for a wallet, “before tracking” for an opening time. A zero means we read and found nothing.

Which wallets

We track the largest accounts on Hyperliquid by account value, and a smaller set of very active accounts that trade like whales: more than 1,000 wallets. Vaults and the exchange’s own liquidity vault are left out. A position counts as a whale position from $1M in value. The list of wallets is refreshed daily, their positions every few minutes.

Names

Whale names are given by WhaleRadar and never name a person. A name belongs to one wallet for at least a year, and an earlier holder is shown with its year, as in “Clear Gale ’26”. The address stays on every whale page, linked to the official Hyperliquid explorer.

Timing

Positions are read every few minutes. Moves reach the free feeds 15 minutes after they are detected. Pro shows them within a minute. Every page says when its data was read.

Distance to liquidation and walls

Distance to liquidation is the gap between the liquidation price and the current price, as a share of price. Each liquidation price is exact for the account as it stands, not a forecast. It moves when the whale adds margin, changes leverage or its other positions move.

Liquidation walls group liquidation prices within ±20% into 1% bands per side. A wall needs at least three wallets and a meaningful share of the whale money that could be liquidated in that range. Walls count every wallet whatever its label, because a forced close moves the price the same way whoever holds the position. A wall is drawn as a soft shape because it is many liquidation prices spread over a range. More in the walls guide.

Opened at

A position’s opening time comes from the wallet’s own fills where they reach. Where they do not, we record the first time we saw the position open, and say so.

Moves, closes and liquidations

Every read of a wallet is compared with the one before. A new position is an open, a larger one an add, a smaller one a trim, a vanished one a close, and a position on the other side a flip. Moves are recorded on positions from $100K, measured as the larger of the size before and after the move. Pro shows them live from $250K, the free feeds from $1M, 15 minutes later. Desk’s API and event stream carry the whole log. A move carries the time WhaleRadar first saw it, so it can be a few minutes late.

For closes, trims and flips the wallet’s fills give the exit price, the realised PnL and whether the exchange liquidated the position. “Liquidated” needs the exchange’s own liquidation mark on a fill. Without one we say the position closed. Each closed position runs from flat to flat, as its fills show. Their realised PnL is the closed PnL Hyperliquid records on the fills that closed them, before fees and funding, the same figure a move page shows for its own fills. Whale pages, the PnL leaderboard, the overview and the moves page all use it.

Pods

A pod is a group of wallets that likely share one owner, found from public transfers between them. A transfer between a wallet and its sub-account counts most, a direct send of $50K or more next and a shared funder least. A funder of many tracked wallets is treated as a service, an exchange or a bridge, and links nobody. A pod’s confidence is that of its most weakly linked wallet. We never name a person.

Liquidations across the exchange

Totals for the whole exchange are shown where they are on record, and marked as such. Otherwise only the tracked whales’ liquidations are shown.

Labels and track record

Labels are estimates from behaviour. Very high turnover at low leverage reads as a market maker, large offsetting long and short positions as a hedger, concentrated one-sided positions as directional. A book clearly on one side at high leverage also reads as directional, however much the wallet trades. Everything else stays unclassified.

The track record: 0–100, from the wallet’s returns on Hyperliquid: all time, the last month and the last week, and whether they agree. Small accounts with outsized returns are damped. It ranks how consistently a wallet has traded, not how big it is.

The Read

The plain-language summary is written from the same numbers you see on the page, in English, Chinese and Korean. It describes positioning and never recommends a trade.

Whale Tide

The Whale Tide is the long share of directional whale money, weighted by track record, from 0 (all short) to 100 (all long). It counts positions of $1M or more held by wallets labelled Directional with a track record. One wallet counts with at most 10% of a scope’s money, and a scope needs at least three such wallets. Scopes are all markets, each asset class and each market. 48 to 52 reads as split, 25 or below strongly short, 75 or above strongly long.

The crowd uses the same scale: the long share of retail accounts, where a public long/short account ratio exists for the coin. The value at 00:00 UTC is the daily close, and the history and the panels for yesterday, last week and last month use these closes. Older closes are reconstructed from the Hyperliquid blockchain’s daily record of every open position, by the same rules. Each of those days counts its largest accounts that traded within 30 days, as many as WhaleRadar tracks with open positions today, in the markets it covers. Today’s track records set the weights, and those days have no crowd value. The money flow beside them adds up what directional whales opened and closed over 7 days, net toward long, and compares it with their usual week. More toward long than usual reads as the tide coming in, more toward short as going out. Data under CC BY 4.0 at /api/tide.json.

Open interest, whale share and funding

Open interest is the value of all open positions in a market, longs and shorts together, as Hyperliquid reports it. The whale share is the part of it the tracked whales hold in positions of $1M or more, at one moment for both figures. Funding is the hourly payment between longs and shorts that keeps the contract near its index, shown as a yearly rate: above zero longs pay shorts, below it shorts pay longs. Each day's close is kept. Older days are reconstructed from the Hyperliquid blockchain's daily records. For those days the whales' part uses today's track records.

Under water

The share of directional whale money at a loss at the price of the moment, from 0 to 100. It counts the same whales as the Whale Tide, weighted by money, one wallet at most 10% of a scope’s money, at least three whales. Hedges and market makers stay out, because one leg of a hedge is always at a loss. Beside it: how far the losing money sits from its entry on average, before leverage. The value at 00:00 UTC is kept with the Tide’s daily close.

Near liquidation

Whale money whose liquidation price sits within 5% of the price, longs and shorts apart. Every label counts, as for the walls, because a forced close moves the price the same way whoever holds the position. Longs near liquidation would be forced to sell into a fall, shorts to buy into a rise. The value at 00:00 UTC is kept with the daily close. Both readings describe where money sits. They are not signals.

The daily report

One page a day, written from the same numbers as every other page, in English, 中文 and 한국어. It holds the Whale Tide, Under water and Near liquidation with their change since the last close, a few sentences on crypto and TradFi, the cases of the day and the day’s moves. The cases are the set the overview shows for the last 24 hours, up to four: the largest liquidation, the largest realised gain and the largest realised loss of a closed position, the largest new money, the largest flip. Today’s report updates every few minutes. At 00:00 UTC the day is archived as it stood. After that it changes only when a number was wrong (see Corrections). Older days are reconstructed the same way from the next day’s close and marked as reconstructed. Their moves are the changes between two daily closes. Their liquidations are the recorded fills with time and price.

Retail long/short

Hyperliquid does not publish a retail long/short ratio. For the large coins we use a public long/short account ratio as a proxy for retail positioning. Markets without such a proxy show the lean of the top track records instead.

Markets

The eight headline markets are Bitcoin, Ether, Hyperliquid, Solana, gold, WTI crude oil, the S&P 500 and Nvidia, free for everyone. Gold, oil, the S&P 500 and Nvidia trade on Hyperliquid’s builder exchanges (HIP-3), around the clock. Pro covers every Hyperliquid market with whale money.

Corrections

A number that was wrong is corrected in place, and we keep a record of every fix. Daily reports otherwise stay as archived. Questions and corrections: contactwhaleradar.com.

Limits

• One person can run many wallets. We see wallets, not people. Pods link wallets only where their transfers show it.
• Positions elsewhere (other exchanges, options) are invisible to us, so a “short” may be a hedge.
• Large accounts can survive drawdowns that would liquidate smaller ones.
• Nothing here is financial advice.