A crypto whale that opened over 300 heavily leveraged short positions on Bitcoin, totaling more than $521 million, closed the shorts on Tuesday and pocketed a profit of $3.9 million. This green trade was made despite a platoon of crypto traders looking to wreck the whale’s position, seeking to boost the price of Bitcoin above the liquidation level.

A short trade is a bet that an asset’s price will drop; the lower it goes, the more money the trader makes. In this scenario, the whale had placed a short trade on Bitcoin that sat at $83,898—and with 40x leverage applied, the total trade surged to a value of more than $521 million. If Bitcoin had risen just 2% from the trade’s open to $85,591, then the whale’s position would have been liquidated.

Hearing this, some crypto degens went after the whale as pseudonymous trader Cbb0fe organized a group to pump over $10 million into Bitcoin, in an attempt to raise the price of the asset above the whale's liquidation mark