Wintermute has opened hundreds of millions of dollars in short positions, and the market is about to fall? Don't treat the inventory accounts of market makers as institutional votes on the market for now Wintermute Address: 0xecb63caa47c4e77f60f1ce858cf28dc2b82b00 Many people click on this address, and the first thing they see is indeed a bit scary. Wintermute currently holds approximately $116 million in perpetual positions in the Hyperliquid core market, plus approximately $14.87 million in HIP-3, for a total position of over $130 million, with the vast majority being short positions Among them, SOL short orders are about $29.83 million, HYPE is about $11.58 million, BTC is about $9.55 million, ETH is about $8.11 million, DOGE is about $6.38 million, and XRP is about $5.94 million. Looking further down, a large string of labels such as BNB, SUI, PUMP, LINK, AAVE, ENA, etc. are also empty. At first glance, it appears that Wintermute is fully betting on a market downturn But Wintermute is not a directional trader who eats by guessing the ups and downs, but one of the world's largest cryptocurrency market makers. Its main business is to simultaneously list buy and sell prices on a large number of trading pairs, providing liquidity to the market, and making money from bid ask spreads, funding rates, trading rebates, and cross market spreads The current pending orders at this address are very indicative of the problem. There are a total of 1701 pending orders in the Hyperliquid core market, including 850 buy orders and 851 sell orders; HIP-3 still has 981 pending orders, including 493 buy orders and 488 sell orders. The quantities on both sides are almost completely symmetrical There are approximately 38.45 million sell orders and 37.39 million buy orders on BTC; ETH has approximately $21.01 million and $21.91 million on both sides respectively; SOL sold for approximately 8.32 million US dollars and paid for approximately 9.35 million US dollars. In the stock and index markets, targets such as Nvidia, Apple, S&P 500, MicroStrategy, SK Hynix, SanDisk, etc. are also quoted together by buying and selling parties This is the normal appearance of a market making account. If customers keep canceling their sell orders, Wintermute will accumulate short inventory in their hands; Customers keep selling to it, and the account will become long again. At a certain moment, seeing a large number of empty orders can only indicate that the transactions and inventory at that time are biased towards one side, and cannot directly deduce Wintermute's belief that the market will definitely decline You can also see hedging traces in the spot account. The address holds approximately 81.6 UBTC spot coins and short approximately 119.4 BTC perpetual coins; Holding approximately 736 UETH, corresponding to approximately 3263 ETH short positions; In addition, it also holds tokenized spot stocks such as HYPE, USOL, UPUMP, UXPL, as well as Nvidia and Micron. For example, Nvidia has approximately 2314 spot orders, corresponding to approximately 4509 perpetual short orders; Micron has approximately 678 spot orders, corresponding to approximately 249 perpetual short orders These positions are not all hedged one-to-one, and Wintermute's inventory in other exchanges, on chain addresses, and off exchange accounts cannot be fully seen from this address. Therefore, it cannot be reversed that all short positions have no directional risk. However, the combination of spot inventory, large quantities of bilateral quotes, and high-frequency transactions covering dozens of markets is sufficient to demonstrate that this is a market making and inventory management account, not a simple bearish viewpoint sheet In the past 30 days, the perpetual transaction volume of this address has exceeded 11.4 billion US dollars. Today's daily transaction volume exceeded 900 million US dollars, and the position will constantly change with customer orders. For this type of account, a floating loss on a short order is not necessarily a bad thing, it may just be that the other side of the spot is making a profit; Losing money in a perpetual account does not mean Wintermute as a whole has lost the same amount of money So in the future, if you see news like 'Wintermute suddenly shorted BTC' or 'Wintermute heavily shorted dozens of coins', first take a look at its spot, pending orders, and other market positions. Ordinary traders open short, usually due to a drop in the price of the underlying asset; Market makers opening short positions often only offset the risk of newly received inventory Wintermute, of course, can also assess market trends and may incur losses due to inventory imbalances and drastic fluctuations, but its main way of making money is not through one-sided betting. Using a screenshot of a market maker's short position at a certain moment to predict market fluctuations is often difficult to understand how their account is recorded Source: Hyperliquid official interface, AiCoin on chain entity tags, and AI analysis data Hyperliquid Wintermute Market Maker BTC ETH SOL HYPE Hedging Smart Money AiCoin