Hit the hot spot, but overestimated the momentum of DeFi.

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

In 2022, due to the sudden collapse of FTX, the fund under Multicoin Capital experienced a loss of 91.4% because of the significant devaluation of SOL.

Looking back today, 2022 may have been the darkest moment for Multicoin Capital. After that, as SOL warmed up and reached new highs, Multicoin Capital was once again "deified." According to data released by Nansen in January this year, among the confirmed investment institutions' holding addresses, the Multicoin Capital address starting with 0x2b0a boasted a profit of 17.84 million dollars in the second half of 2025.

Although a single address may not provide insight into Multicoin Capital's overall actual profits, it is enough to illustrate that this investment institution's strength in investing should not be underestimated. From the end of 2025 to mid-2026, Multicoin Capital delivered a mixed report card: it gained substantial profits from the popular HYPE and ZEC, while also stumbling on AAVE and ENA.

Due to ZEC's privacy trading characteristics, Multicoin Capital's ZEC holdings could not be tracked. In May of this year, Multicoin Capital co-founder and managing partner Tushar Jain stated that Multicoin Capital had built a heavy position in ZEC since February.

According to TradingView market information, from February to April this year, the price of ZEC fluctuated between 200 and 350 dollars, later rising to nearly 700 dollars in May, with the current price remaining above 500 dollars. The overall holding cost of Multicoin Capital's ZEC is unknown, but even if we calculate at 350 dollars, the return rate exceeds 40%.

In comparison to ZEC, the investment situation of HYPE is relatively clear.

According to on-chain data analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, the address suspected to be Multicoin Capital's HYPE holding address that starts with 0xaB3 transferred 395,000 HYPE into Coinbase and requested redemption of 211,000 HYPE staked on Hyperliquid early yesterday morning Beijing time. This portion was acquired about 5 months ago when HYPE was around 30 dollars through OTC, and afterward, there were no additional actions except staking.

In May this year, Onchain Lens detected that three addresses related to Multicoin Capital had staked about 1.96 million HYPE, with 2.83 million HYPE remaining in the wallets, totaling around 4.8 million HYPE.

Taking the address starting with 0x76d shown in the above image as an example, all three addresses concentrated their purchases of HYPE between 5 and 3 months ago, and began to sell off part of it systematically from one month ago. From the on-chain information gathered so far, it seems that Multicoin Capital acquired at least 5.5 million HYPE, and has sold more than half of the holdings by now. The expected profit is at least over 70 million dollars.

Although Multicoin Capital managing partner Tushar Jain stated that the unstaking was to transfer tokens to prevent being continuously tracked, according to on-chain information, aside from some tokens transferred to new addresses, many were directly transferred to Galaxy Digital's deposit address, most likely for sale.

Combining the previously mentioned time for Multicoin Capital's ZEC positioning, it can be inferred that Multicoin likely concentrated its investments in tokens including ZEC and HYPE between February and April this year, which is within two months after Bitcoin fell to 60,000 dollars. This is also consistent with Multicoin Capital managing partner Tushar Jain's assertion in a July interview that the crypto market has bottomed out.

However, from the selling situation, it seems they are not so firm on the belief that it has "already bottomed out."

Multicoin Capital's bottom-fishing in ZEC and HYPE this year has undoubtedly been successful, but at the same time, they have also begun to take losses for last year's "impulsiveness."

Multicoin started buying AAVE in early October 2025, and by the end of November had built a position of at least 338,000 AAVE. According to Yu Jin's statistics, the average price of these AAVE holdings was about 219 dollars.

However, on May 14, 15, and 16 of this year, that address swiftly liquidated all AAVE holdings, and according to AAVE's prices during those three days, I estimate the selling average should be around 95 dollars, resulting in an overall loss exceeding 35 million dollars.

Furthermore, in November 2025, Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani tweeted that a "large position" was established in ENA in 2025.

We do not know how large the "large position" is, but at least one address holding over 56 million ENA concentrated its liquidation of all ENA holdings on June 5 this year.

According to Etherscan information, this portion of holdings was acquired in a concentrated manner on October 15, 2025, and on the day of purchase, ENA's price was still around 0.44 dollars. However, when sold on June 5 this year, the price of ENA had already fallen below 0.1 dollars. The loss of this investment is expected to be close to 20 million dollars.

Between the end of last year and the first half of this year, Multicoin Capital also operated with tokens such as SOL and WLD, but temporarily the positions are in a state where profits and losses cannot be accounted for. Overall, this year, the "second hype" of privacy concepts and Hyperliquid's "new brilliance" have been bottom-fished relatively well by Multicoin Capital, but the investment in AAVE and ENA, representing new and old DeFi at the end of last year, misjudged the overall market direction on one hand, and overestimated the momentum of these projects on the other.

Although Aave and Ethena have indeed made good progress during this period, the returns brought by the development have not ultimately reflected on the rights of token holders. After the speculation on concepts and narratives ended, there was no actual driving force to support price increases or even just maintain the status quo.

Based on the current statistics on HYPE, AAVE, and ENA operations, Multicoin Capital still has over 15 million dollars in profit. The investment institution's style has always been to place heavy bets on favored targets, but profits and losses share the same source, and the high-stakes operations only brought in less than 20 million dollars from hundreds of millions invested, which does not count as absolutely good news.