James Wynn Goes Long on PEPE Hours After Losing $100M on Leveraged Bitcoin Bet

“James Wynn,” the closely-watched trader, has now placed a $12 million worth of long bet on PEPE just hours after losing over $100 million in bitcoin BTC long positions.

Wynn, known for placing billion-dollar bets on the onchain trading platform Hyperliquid, opened a new 10x leveraged long worth more than $12 million on the memecoin PEPE, Hyperdash data shows.

Wynn now holds 934 million PEPE tokens valued at approximately $12.1 million. His entry price of $0.0129 has already netted him an unrealized gain of 10.66%—a small but notable pivot after last week’s disastrous Bitcoin trade.

Wynn’s bitcoin losses are the stuff of crypto legend. Earlier in the week, he had built a record-setting $1.25 billion notional long position at an average price of $108,243, only to see it collapse as bitcoin’s dipped below $105,000 after U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff announcement on EU exports.

Multiple liquidations — including a 527 BTC position worth over $55 million and a 421 BTC position worth nearly $44 million — wiped out more than $100 million of Wynn’s holdings over the past days.

As such, the latest move into PEPE has got traders wondering if Wynn is a real person with a gambling addiction — or an account funded to drum up attention to Hyperliquid.

Either way, the money is real and the week-long saga has proven Hyperliquid’s capability to handle billions of dollars in a single trader wholly using smart contracts and its native blockchain.

The hype has turned out real for Hyperliquid’s own HYPE, with the token up 20% in the past two weeks amid the recent attention to the platform.