NEAR Whale Up $17.5M on Hyperliquid as NEAR Soars 187%

Highlights

Trader mk4 holds the largest NEAR long on Hyperliquid: 5.838 million NEAR at 10x leverage, worth about $31.28 million.
Average entry sits at $2.35 against a price near $5.36, leaving roughly $17.55 million in unrealized profit.
The position alone accounts for 7.68% of all NEAR open interest on the venue.
NEAR has climbed about 187% since early September, including an 80% run in a single week.

One wallet now controls nearly a thirteenth of every open NEAR bet on Hyperliquid, and it is sitting on more than $17 million in paper gains.

The trader, known on-chain as mk4, holds a 10x leveraged long of roughly 5.838 million NEAR, according to on-chain monitoring flagged on Sunday. At current prices the position is worth about $31.28 million. It was built at an average entry of $2.35, and with NEAR trading near $5.36 the unrealized profit comes to approximately $17.55 million. That is the single biggest NEAR long on the exchange, representing 7.68% of the token’s total open interest there.

The timing is what stands out. mk4 began building the trade in early September, with on-chain records placing the main entry around September 6, when NEAR was still changing hands in the low $2 range and drawing little attention. Since then the token has gained about 187%. Measured from mk4’s own average entry, the price is up close to 128%.

How the rally unfolded

NEAR’s move did not arrive in one candle. On September 9 the token jumped about 11% to around $2.61 with no single announcement behind it, a move market watchers tied to renewed rotation into AI-linked layer-1 projects. The real acceleration came in the middle of the month. Between roughly September 16 and September 24, NEAR ran from about $2.36 to $4.27, a gain of more than 80% in a week, clearing a resistance band between $3.80 and $3.90 along the way.

By September 21 the network’s total value locked had reached roughly $187 million, with around 52,000 active addresses and about $84 million in daily DEX volume. Momentum carried into the weekend: on September 26 NEAR printed an intraday high of $5.18 after a 6.5% daily gain, and it has since pushed past that level toward $5.36.

One concrete catalyst sits directly under this trade. NEAR recently rolled out perpetual futures that are confidential by default and powered by Hyperliquid, letting traders open positions without publicly tying them to their accounts. The product is funded through NEAR Intents, which pulls collateral from about 30 blockchains and more than 100 assets. For a token whose largest leveraged bettor happens to trade on Hyperliquid, the overlap is hard to miss, though nothing in the data suggests mk4 has any link to the launch itself.

Not the only whale in the trade

mk4 has company. Earlier in the week, a second Hyperliquid address beginning 0x30af held about 5.14 million NEAR in longs, built between late August and September 4 at an average of roughly $1.95. At the time, that position showed close to $12 million in unrealized gains. Together the two wallets controlled nearly 11 million NEAR of long exposure, a heavy concentration for a single perpetual market.

mk4’s book is also more nuanced than one directional bet. NEAR is the trader’s only long, but earlier data showed short positions across seven other assets worth about $14.7 million, which partly offsets the NEAR exposure. It looks less like an all-in wager and more like a relative-value view: long one high-conviction name, short a basket. Readers who followed the UNI whale that added $9.05 million during its 145% run will recognize the pattern of large wallets pressing winners late into a move.

The altcoin backdrop

NEAR is riding a broader wave. CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost said the total altcoin market cap grew more than 32% over a 30-day window in early September, and the rolling 30-day gain still sits at about 12.5%. By that measure, this is the strongest expansion in altcoins since July 2025, with liquidity flowing into the sector steadily since July of this year. Darkfost cautioned that markets do not move in straight lines and that patience matters for anyone seeking exposure at these levels.

The same rotation has lifted other mid-caps sharply, from ENA’s 277% climb since July to Zcash’s record run. SUI has also staged a sharp recovery this week, with some traders noting that a single week of gains has erased the token’s losses for all of 2026.

What concentrated leverage means from here

A position this size cuts both ways. While NEAR keeps rising, a whale holding 7.68% of open interest has little reason to sell, and the unrealized profit acts as a cushion. But leverage at 10x means the trade’s risk profile changes quickly on a pullback, and any decision by mk4 to take profit would hit a market where two wallets hold a large share of the long side. Crowded longs unwinding is exactly the setup that punished the other side of the Zcash trade, where one short seller was forced to eat a $10.68 million loss as the market ran against them.

Technically, traders are watching the $4.45 area, Saturday’s 24-hour low, as the first line of support, with the old $3.80 to $3.90 breakout zone below that. On the upside, crypto analyst Michaël van de Poppe shared a NEAR chart on Sunday calling the current move just the first leg of a larger advance, and some chartists have floated spot targets as high as $8.

For now, the scoreboard is simple. A trader who bought NEAR before the crowd noticed it is up roughly $17.55 million in three weeks, and the market is waiting to see whether mk4 holds, adds, or starts to trim.