What To Know:
- On-chain analyst Specter links BTX Capital and founder Vanessa Cao to alleged manipulation of POPCAT, TST and other tokens on Hyperliquid.
- Analysis cites coordinated $25M buy-wall activity, wallet clusters, and fund flows tied to BTX Capital–associated addresses.
- Cao denied any involvement, while Specter points to ENS records and multisig links connecting the wallets to BTX Capital.
On-chain research conducted by crypto analyst Specter has linked BTX Capital and its founder, Vanessa Cao, to a series of alleged price-manipulation events on the derivatives platform Hyperliquid. The findings by @SpecterAnalyst, published in a detailed thread, identify coordinated buy-wall tactics and fund flows that, Specter asserts, were used to manufacture demand and profit from opposing positions off-chain.
BTX Capital Founder Linked to Hyperliquid Manipulation
According to Specter’s timeline, the most notable incident took place on November 12 at approximately 16:00 UTC, when a buy wall of roughly $25 million was placed near $0.21 for the token POPCAT. The orders were created across more than two dozen wallets to produce the appearance of substantial buying interest and then cancelled, a move that triggered widespread liquidations among leveraged traders. Specter reports the orchestrator suffered about $4 million in collateral losses while Hyperliquidity Provider exposure suffered roughly $4.9 million in losses.
Specter’s on-chain tracing points to a cluster of wallets that previously surfaced in manipulation activity involving the token TST. Those wallets, the analyst claims, show deposit patterns into centralized exchanges and links to multisignature addresses that connect back to BTX Capital’s known wallet and an ENS name, vanessacao.eth. Fund-flow records cited in the analysis include deposits to OKX and Bybit wallets and transfers coming from addresses that Specter ties to BTX Capital’s official holdings.
The analyst also names other tokens that have experienced unusual volatility , ZEREBRO, JELLYJELLY, HIFI and, he suggests, ZEC, and raises the prospect that the same tactics were employed across multiple markets. Specter outlines a recurring scheme: manipulate on-chain prices within Hyperliquid and take opposing positions on centralized exchanges, thereby profiting from forced liquidations and divergent price exposure.
BTX Capital, which presents itself as a liquid trading and investment firm established in 2019, describes its strategy as focused on “liquid token strategies” and alpha generation. Specter frames the firm’s access to sizable capital as an enabling factor for rapid fund movement, asserting that the scale of transfers would permit the kind of market influence observed in the November events.
Vanessa Cao, the founder of BTX Capital, publicly responded to the allegations. “Thank you for your analysis. I do not have the trading skills to implement such a strategy, and the wallet named is not mine. Those familiar with my work know I do not undertake on-chain hedging transactions,” she wrote. Specter replied to that denial by pointing to ENS registration records and a Gnosis multisig address he associates with both vanessacao.eth and BTX Capital.
The on-chain investigator provided transaction chains and wallet identifiers to support the narrative, describing transfers, gas-fee patterns and exchange deposit addresses that trace capital flow across Ethereum and Polygon. Specter cautioned that he had filtered out smaller transactions to clarify the trail and invited others to examine the data for corroboration.
Neither BTX Capital nor Hyperliquid has been independently confirmed as the orchestrators of the trades by regulatory authorities. The allegations remain contested, and public statements from BTX Capital dispute links between the company and the wallets named in Specter’s thread.
The sequence of large buy orders followed by cancellations, and with cross-platform short positions highlighted by Specter, seems like a market-manipulation case, however, further investigations are awaited.
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