He's Selling Zombie Apes to Fund a Losing Bet

To investors,

Jeffrey Huang - better known as Machi Big Brother - sold Bored Ape #5670 for 9 ETH today. He bought it five years ago for 85 ETH. That is a loss of 76 ETH, roughly $142,000 at current prices, or 89.4% of the original cost. Then he used those 9 ETH to add margin to a leveraged ETH long that already stands at 3,450 ETH, worth about $6.44 million.

This is not a quirky NFT story. This is the clearest real-time case study of what happens when you layer leverage on top of assets that have already lost their market.

The data on Machi's run is impossible to ignore:

• Cumulative losses on Hyperliquid since September 2025: over $80 million, according to Arkham Intelligence
• Bored Ape NFTs sold over a single month (ending late June): 34 apes for 326 ETH, realizing a loss of roughly 399 ETH, or about $631,000, per Lookonchain
• Peak BAYC holdings: over 200 apes. He posted a photo of 182 in May 2026. Now he's liquidating them one by one.
• As of July 28, his Hyperliquid balance was down to roughly $160,000, less than $20 away from being fully liquidated, per Arkham

He is selling zombie assets to prop up a leveraged bet on the same asset that's been grinding his account for ten months.

Let's look at the underlying asset he's selling. Bored Ape Yacht Club peaked in April 2022 with a floor price of 152 ETH - roughly $430,000. Justin Bieber paid $1.3 million for his. Eminem paid $460,000. The floor today sits around 8.4 to 10 ETH. That is a decline of roughly 93 to 95%.

The entire ecosystem built around BAYC collapsed with it. ApeCoin - the governance token Yuga Labs launched in 2022 - went from $26.70 to roughly $0.50. A 98% decline. Yuga Labs raised $450 million at a $4 billion valuation from Andreessen Horowitz, then laid off staff in multiple rounds. Co-founder Greg Solano told his own company in April 2024 that they had "Yuga lost its way - we became too complex, too slow, and too distracted from what matters."

This is the ghost chain framework applied to NFTs. The natural business cycle is not allowed to play out. BAYC doesn't produce revenue, generate cash flow, or create utility that people actually use. It's a JPEG that the market decided was worth almost nothing. But because it lives on a blockchain, it doesn't go away - it just slowly bleeds value.

Ghost chains and zombie coins make up the vast majority of the crypto industry. NFTs are no different. Most of this space is dead and never coming back. Only bitcoin, stablecoins, infrastructure, and real tokenization survive. Digital profile pictures with celebrity endorsements do not.

Now look at the leveraged bet he's funding with these losses. ETH is trading at $1,866 today, down 38% over the past 250 trading days and down about 60% from the roughly $4,700 it traded at when Machi's losing streak began in September 2025. His 3,450-ETH long position carries a liquidation price that keeps getting pushed down as he adds margin from apes he's selling at 89% losses.

This is not conviction. This is averaging down on a losing trade with proceeds from an asset class that has already collapsed. The math doesn't work either way.

The opposing view is simple: Machi is a whale. He has money. He's been right before - his Hyperliquid profits peaked at roughly $44.8 million in September 2025. Maybe ETH bounces, maybe his long pays off, and this whole run looks like temporary pain.

That's a fair point. He could be right about ETH eventually. But being eventually right doesn't matter if you're liquidated before the move happens. And the strategy of cannibalizing zombie NFTs to extend a leveraged position is structurally broken - you're converting illiquid loss-making assets into margin on an asset that's already cost you $80 million.

There's also the question of what on-chain data actually shows versus what it hides. Arkham and Lookonchain can only track tagged wallets and visible positions. We don't know his full net worth, off-exchange holdings, or whether he has capital reserves that don't show up in public data. That's a real data gap. But everything we can see points in one direction.

The broader NFT market tells the same story. BAYC was once the crown jewel of digital collectibles. The floor price collapsed 94%. The companion projects collapsed. The governance token collapsed. The parent company collapsed. The celebrity holders who bought at peak are sitting on losses that look like rounding errors compared to what they paid.

What Machi's doing today is the endgame of a broken thesis. Buy expensive digital collectibles at the top of a bubble. When they lose 90% of their value, sell them to fund leveraged bets on the underlying blockchain. When those bets get liquidated, repeat the cycle. Sell another ape. Add more margin. Hope for the bounce.

The market has spoken loudly on both sides of this trade. BAYC is down 94%. Machi's ETH long has lost over $80 million. The only thing keeping this machine running is a steady supply of apes to liquidate.

Most of the crypto industry is dead and never coming back. Machi Big Brother is the proof - selling the corpses to fund a trade that keeps killing him.