On January 20, 2026, at 8:00 AM UTC+8, Jeffrey Huang (known in the circle as "Brother Ma Ji") encountered five consecutive liquidations of long positions on ETH contracts, with an on-chain visible cumulative loss reaching $24.18 million, quickly causing a stir in the Chinese-speaking crypto community. In a short period, the combination of 25x high leverage and the short-term decline in ETH prices created a nearly inescapable deadly combination, with each sharp price drop precisely breaching his fragile margin defense line. Surrounding this chain of liquidations, the massive losses, real-time on-chain observation, and the complex emotions of the Chinese-speaking community regarding "celebrities heavily investing" intertwined, making this incident not just a failed trade, but more like a live experiment on high-leverage speculation by large players, on-chain transparency, and collective emotions.
Massive Losses from the Chain Reaction of Five Liquidations
From public data, the main storyline of this incident is very clear: Brother Ma Ji established high-leverage long positions on ETH, and as the market weakened, his margin was repeatedly consumed, triggering five liquidations within a short time frame. These liquidations were not isolated mistakes but a chain reaction where the previous round of losses had not yet been digested, and the next round of added risks was already on the table, ultimately pushing the visible cumulative losses to the $24.18 million level. This figure has been regarded by several institutions as a rare case of significant losses in personal on-chain trading records in 2026, especially presented in the form of concentrated explosions within a single trading day, making it even more striking.
Deep Tide TechFlow categorized this incident directly as one of the "largest single-day personal trading loss cases publicly visible since 2026," a statement that was subsequently quoted and rephrased by several Chinese-speaking media and KOLs, forming a relatively unified market consensus on social platforms. Starting from Lookonchain's on-chain monitoring, through reports from TechFlowDaily, BlockBeats, and Jinse Finance, this label was continuously reinforced in the dissemination path, making this $24.18 million loss not just a cold number, but narrated as a symbolic event of a "top-tier large player crashing."
Compared to the capital size of ordinary investors, the loss of $24.18 million has a strong visceral impact. For many retail investors, this amount is enough to rewrite the financial fate of dozens or even hundreds of families, and in the context of personal trading, it can almost be seen as an "astronomical-level" failure case. Because of this, when the loss amount was clearly quantified and continuously referenced on social media, it quickly transcended a mere market fluctuation, becoming a symbolic representation of the Chinese-speaking community's discussion on "extreme risk tolerance" and "gambling-style speculation."
The Dangerous Intersection of 25x Leverage and ETH Volatility
On a technical level, the core contradiction of this liquidation storm can be simplified into one sentence: High leverage = extremely fragile positions. According to calculations by BlockBeats analysts, 25x leverage means that as long as the price of the underlying asset experiences about a 4% pullback, the position will be pushed directly to the edge of liquidation. In other words, a not uncommon drop within the normal daily volatility range of ETH is enough to leave such leveraged long positions "at the mercy of fate," with the safety of the position almost entirely determined by random noise.
A key data point frequently cited in this incident is the liquidation price of the ETH long position at $2,991.43. According to Lookonchain monitoring, this price range happened to be in the area of ETH's short-term pullback. When the market retreated from its high and tested this price level in a short time, the buffer space for high-leverage positions was almost compressed to zero, and any further selling pressure or liquidity contraction would trigger forced liquidation like a trigger. For Brother Ma Ji, holding a 25x leveraged long position, this short-term drop in ETH was not a rare black swan, but more like a "test that was bound to come" within the framework of volatility, only the excessive stacking of chips made the cost of the test dramatically amplified.
In a more contrasting situation, after the five liquidations occurred, on-chain data showed that he still held a long position of 2,200 ETH, also with a leverage of 25x, with a nominal value of about $6.67 million at the time's market price. To ordinary investors, such a position size could be seen as "a behemoth," but under the amplification mechanism of high leverage, this seemingly large position is actually very easy to collapse under a few percentage points of volatility. On the surface, it is a "heavy bet on the bullish side" close to seven million dollars, but in reality, it is a sandcastle built on a 4% margin of error, which could be instantly wiped out with a slight increase in turbulence.
The Paradox of On-Chain Spectatorship and Information Transparency
The reason this liquidation event was able to sweep through the Chinese-speaking community within hours is largely due to the high transparency of on-chain data and the maturity of the dissemination mechanism. On-chain monitoring accounts represented by Lookonchain tracked the changes in holdings and liquidation records of specific addresses in real-time, capturing the abnormal movements of Brother Ma Ji's address at the first opportunity: high leverage, multiple liquidations, and continuously amplifying loss data. These accounts possess strong data capture and interpretation capabilities, quickly transforming cold on-chain changes into concrete stories, and then packaging them with charts and concise text for input into the information flow of social media.
On-chain transparency presents a typical paradox here. On one hand, it greatly enhances the information efficiency of the market, allowing the risks of significant positions, liquidation rhythms, and capital inflows and outflows to be equally known by all participants, which is a step towards a mature market from the perspective of pricing mechanisms and risk management. On the other hand, when this type of transparent information is combined with the celebrity effect, personal trading mistakes are also amplified into a "live incident" for public observation, turning risks that originally only needed to be settled on the books with exchanges into a public narrative recorded and recounted across the internet.
In this case, this amplification effect is particularly evident. Data screenshots provided by on-chain monitoring, shared and reinterpreted by TechFlowDaily, BlockBeats, Jinse Finance, quickly constructed a scene of "the whole internet watching his trades." Different accounts focused on the same batch of data, either emphasizing the absolute loss scale of $24.18 million, highlighting the dangerous relationship between 25x leverage and 4% volatility, or focusing on the remaining 2,200 ETH that had not yet been liquidated, ultimately forming a highly convergent information content chain with continuously overlapping emotional expressions. For the person involved, each forced liquidation is not only a loss on the asset level but also a mark amplified in the public opinion arena.
The Identity Shift from Taiwanese Artist to Leverage Player
To understand why this liquidation attracted such concentrated attention in the Chinese-speaking community, one must return to the identity background of the person involved. Jeffrey Huang was initially known as a Taiwanese artist, and later transformed into an active investor and large player in the crypto market. The early accumulated fame and social resources made every large position and conspicuous transfer he established on-chain naturally more likely to become the focus of monitoring accounts and media attention. Compared to ordinary anonymous addresses, these actions would quickly be tagged with clear personal labels, turning into topics like "Brother So-and-So is at it again."
In the long-term market participation, Brother Ma Ji gradually became viewed by some community opinions as one of the representatives of "successful large players" and "daring to go all in," with his trading style of using high leverage and making large bets in a single direction being consumed as part of a legendary story by many. However, when the market turned against him and liquidations occurred, these originally somewhat worshipful labels would undergo a dramatic reversal in a very short time—"successful large player" was rewritten as "failure case," and "daring to go all in" transformed into a negative sample of "extreme risk preference," with his personal image rapidly shifted to a "risk education" showcase in market narratives.
In terms of the position size itself, this 2,200 ETH long position accounted for only about 0.12% of the total network futures positions on that day. From a macro perspective of the global derivatives market, this is far from being a "super whale" that could sway the market. But in the context of the Chinese-speaking community, such a position size combined with a celebrity identity constitutes all the elements of a "high attention event." It has a sufficiently large number to support discussion, yet it does not seem so large as to be detached from ordinary people's imagination, making it easier to project onto the psychological projection of "if I had that much money, would I do the same?"
Collective Betting in the Emotional Vortex
As the details of the liquidation rapidly spread on social media, the public sentiment surrounding Brother Ma Ji quickly polarized. In the comments section, the most intuitive layer was a distant "watching the show"—people discussed whether 25x leverage was too aggressive, joking about "another large player crashing," and using a light-hearted or even mocking tone to wrap this massive loss in a narrative shell. In this narrative, $24.18 million seemed more like topic material rather than a real risk sample.
At the same time, there were also voices with a stronger sense of schadenfreude, viewing the celebrity's liquidation as a kind of retribution for "gambling-style speculation," making value judgments based on the premise of "having long been skeptical of this all-in approach." In contrast, some began to reflect on their own risk preferences, realizing that they were replicating similar high-risk models with smaller capital sizes, only because their market value was smaller and volatility had not yet amplified, they had narrowly avoided a similar outcome. These reflections gradually shifted the event from a simple "crash joke" to a "risk mirror," providing many participants with a reference point to reassess their own position management.
On a more macro level, such public liquidation cases often amplify market caution and even panic in the short term. For traders already in a high-leverage state, seeing a celebrity's long position being liquidated in a 4% fluctuation often leads them to directly associate it with the fragility of their own positions, prompting them to reduce leverage or temporarily step back to observe. Conversely, some attempted to interpret the large player's liquidation as a local bottom signal, treating such events as a contrarian indicator of "emotional stampede nearing its end." Regardless of the interpretation, the public liquidation story objectively changed market participants' subjective perceptions of leverage risk, thereby influencing their willingness to increase leverage in the following period.
A Wake-Up Call in the Era of Leverage
Returning to this incident itself, the core lesson it presents is very straightforward: using high leverage on high-volatility assets is almost equivalent to completely entrusting life and death to price noise of about 4%. Under a 25x leverage structure, a not uncommon short-term pullback in ETH is enough to instantly wipe out a long position with a nominal value of millions of dollars, and the so-called "correct directional judgment" can very likely be offset by mismatched time dimensions and capital endurance. The cumulative loss of $24.18 million has concretized this somewhat abstract risk logic into an extremely vivid counterexample.
From the perspective of different participants, the signals released by this liquidation event are not the same. For individual traders, the most direct insight is the importance of position management and leverage control—even with capital sizes and risk tolerances far exceeding those of ordinary people, when the leverage multiple is pushed to the same magnitude as daily fluctuations, the so-called "ability to withstand volatility" mathematically collapses to zero. For platforms and market infrastructure, this event also highlights the necessity of risk education and transparency of liquidation mechanisms, allowing more users to visually see the survival probabilities of their positions under different volatility scenarios before they click on the leverage multiple.
In terms of public opinion and the on-chain ecosystem, this case reiterates that on-chain transparency is a double-edged sword: it prevents significant risk events from being buried in a centralized black box, allowing all market participants to use it to calibrate their risk perception; at the same time, it permanently inscribes every major personal mistake into the public narrative, amplifying emotional fluctuations and public pressure. Looking ahead, whether Brother Ma Ji and similar large players will adjust their leverage usage and position management strategies remains to be seen. However, it can be anticipated that, in the cycle of one liquidation story after another, the market's blind enthusiasm for high leverage will eventually be gradually weakened, and more people will learn to redefine a clearer safety boundary between volatility and greed in the wake of extreme cases.
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