James Wynn: The Degen King's Rise and Fall 🎰
TGIF Dispatchers.
From the crime-ridden streets of a forgotten UK town to the peak of crypto's most audacious trades.
From turning $7,000 into $25 million on a meme coin nobody believed in.
From billion-dollar Bitcoin bets that made Wall Street traders weep with envy.
To watching $100 million evaporate in a final liquidation while the entire crypto world looked on in horror.
Meet James Wynn – the trader who embodied every degen's wildest dreams and worst nightmares.
His story begins with a TRS-80 computer and a hunger born from poverty. It crescendos with the most transparent trading meltdown in crypto history.
And it ends with questions that cut to the heart of what this industry has become.
The man they called "moonpig" on Hyperliquid became crypto's one big lesson to be learned. Let's dive into the rise and spectacular fall of the degen king.
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The Forgotten Town Kid
James Wynn wasn't born into privilege.
According to his own accounts on social media, he emerged from what he calls a "forgotten town" in the UK – a place characterised by high crime rates, drug abuse, alcohol problems, and crushing poverty.
"I was born in the trenches," he says.
This wasn't the typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur origin story.
No Stanford MBA, no family connections, no venture capital pedigree.
Just a kid who "barely made ends meet every week" and developed an appetite for risk that would make hedge fund managers nervous.
When you've got nothing to lose, betting everything feels rational. When survival is your baseline, extreme leverage becomes just another Tuesday.
The exact details of his early life remain deliberately vague – Wynn has kept his personal identity largely private, operating behind pseudonyms and wallet addresses. But the hunger he describes is unmistakable in every trade he would later make.
By 2020, he'd found his way into cryptocurrency.
The first breadcrumb appeared in December 2020, when blockchain investigators discovered he'd received 6,000 USD worth of Ethereum from Alameda Research – Sam Bankman-Fried's now-infamous trading firm.
Whether this was seed funding, payment for services, or something else entirely remains unclear. What matters is that it gave Wynn his initial stake in the game.
He was about to turn that stake into something extraordinary.
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The PEPE Prophecy
The trade that made James Wynn's reputation began with boredom.
In 2023, like mentioned in his X post, while browsing iToken for micro-cap meme coins, he stumbled across something that would change his life: PEPE, inspired by the "Pepe the Frog" internet meme.
The market cap was $600,000. Most traders wouldn't have bothered with the gas fees.
Wynn saw something different.
With roughly $7,000 in initial capital, Wynn began accumulating PEPE tokens when almost nobody cared. Then he did something that would cement his legend: he went public with a prediction.
In April 2023, when PEPE's market cap sat at $4.2 million, Wynn declared it would reach $4.2 billion.
That's a 1,000x prediction. On a meme coin. Based on a cartoon frog.
The crypto world laughed. Then PEPE did exactly what Wynn said it would.
By December 2024, PEPE's market cap had exceeded $10 billion. Wynn's $7,000 had become roughly $25 million – a return of over 3,500x.
But the money was only part of the story. The prediction had made Wynn a legend in meme coin circles.
He wasn't just lucky – he'd called his shot and delivered.
The community dubbed him the "10U God of War" – a reference to starting with small amounts and scaling to millions. His Twitter followers hung on every word.
That's when things started to get complicated.
The Influencer's Dilemma
Success in crypto brings followers.
Followers bring responsibility.
And responsibility was never Wynn's strong suit.
By 2024, riding high on his PEPE success, Wynn began promoting other tokens. His pattern was simple: find a micro-cap meme coin, accumulate quietly, then promote publicly.
The ELON incident would define this phase of his career.
In April 2024, Wynn began promoting a token called ELON with the same enthusiasm he'd shown for PEPE. He made "crazy orders" and built up community excitement. What his followers didn't know was that he'd quietly accumulated positions across multiple wallets.
As ELON's price soared, Wynn declared there was a "problem" with the token and announced he was clearing his position. The price collapsed 70% almost immediately.
His followers, who'd bought based on his recommendation, were left holding worthless tokens while Wynn walked away with profits.
The backlash was swift and brutal. The community that had celebrated him as a prophet now denounced him as a manipulator. His reputation, built on the PEPE success, lay in ruins.
Similar allegations would follow with other tokens.
BabyPepe: Accused of receiving 2% of the token supply, promoting it in his Telegram group, then selling immediately for $68,000 in profits.
MOONPIG: Allegedly bought 3% of the total supply, pumped the price through social media, then dumped his holdings.
WYNN and ELON tokens: Both collapsed after launch despite his backing.
Wynn denied wrongdoing, claiming he was "only an investor and not involved in developing or manipulating" the coins. But the damage was done.
The meme coin god had fallen. It was time for a reinvention.
The Hyperliquid Era
In March 2025, James Wynn made a decision that would define his legacy: he deposited around $6 million into Hyperliquid, a decentralised perpetuals exchange.
The platform was perfect for Wynn's new strategy. High leverage, low fees, and complete transparency of all trades. Unlike centralised exchanges where whale movements remain hidden, every position on Hyperliquid was public.
Wynn wasn't just trading – he was performing.
Between March and May 23, 2025, he executed 39 leveraged trades with a 43.59% win rate. But it wasn't the win rate that caught attention – it was the size.
His leverage was anything but simple.
He regularly deployed 40x leverage on Bitcoin and 10x on meme coins, with an average leverage ratio around 22x. This meant his $55.8 million in collateral controlled positions worth over $1.25 billion.
By May 10 the wins become spectacular.
PEPE long position: $23.8M unrealised profit
Bitcoin long: $5.4M unrealised profit
Official Trump: $5.57M unrealised profit
Fartcoin: $5.15M unrealised profit
By May 23, his profits had peaked at $87 million.
His trading generated enormous fees for Hyperliquid – over $2.3 million in just two months. Some theorised he was deliberately showcasing the platform's capabilities.
"They want me to trade on ByBit, I won't stop using HyperLiquid even if they offer me $1m a month," Wynn claimed. "Half the reason I'm shilling my trades publicly is because I want HL to dominate the exchange market share because other exchanges are corrupted."
The transparency was intoxicating. Here was a trader willing to show every position, every profit, every loss. The crypto world was captivated.
They were about to witness history – just not the kind Wynn intended.
The Seven Days That Broke a King
May 19, 2025. Bitcoin: $103,302.
James Wynn opened a 40x leveraged long position of 5,520 BTC at $103,302, placing his liquidation level at $98,294.
What followed was seven days of increasingly desperate trading that would destroy a fortune and create crypto's most public meltdown.
Day 1-2 (May 19-20): Wynn expanded his position to 7,764 BTC, raising the notional value to $830 million. His average entry moved to $105,033, with liquidation now at $100,330.
Day 3 (May 21): He increased exposure to 9,371.71 BTC, pushing the position above $1 billion. The trade showed unrealised gains of $10.71 million with an average entry of $108,005. Later that day, he closed 2,139 BTC, securing $11.92 million in realised profit.
Day 4 (May 22): A fresh long of 10,200 BTC at $108,065. As Bitcoin touched $111,900, unrealised gains peaked at $39 million.
Day 5 (May 23): The turning point. Bitcoin dropped 4% to $106,700 following Trump's announcement of a 50% tariff on EU imports. Wynn closed a separate PEPE position with a $25.18 million gain and increased his Bitcoin long to 11,588 BTC at $108,243. Liquidation level: $105,180.
Day 6 (May 24): He exited at $107,746, booking a $13.39 million loss. In desperation, he shifted to shorting, scaling his Bitcoin short to 7,967.83 BTC valued at $856 million, with liquidation at $111,280.
Day 7 (May 26): The final blow. Wynn exited over $1 billion worth of BTC short positions, recording a loss of approximately $15.87 million over 15 hours.
The total damage over seven days: approx. $65 million lost.
His peak profits of $87 million had collapsed to roughly $27 million. But even that figure was misleading – the bleeding wasn't over.
Day 8 (May 30): As Bitcoin dipped below $105,000, James Wynn was liquidated for 949 BTC worth $99.3 million.
Reality of his Hyperliquid dashboard – a web of red liquidation markers that told the story of complete financial destruction. Arkham intelligence platform confirmed the scale:
His response?
From peak profits of $87 million to total liquidation. The transparency that had made him famous had documented every step of his destruction for the world to see.
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The Hunting Season
Perhaps the cruelest aspect of Wynn's downfall was how public it became.
Because Hyperliquid made all trades transparent, other traders could see his exact liquidation levels. What followed was described by blockchain analyst Lookonchain as "brutal hunting."
Sophisticated traders were deliberately targeting his stop losses and liquidation levels. The transparency that had built his following became a weapon used against him.
Some traders even adopted "reverse-Wynn" strategies. According to on-chain data, one trader made $5.6 million in realised gains over three days by doing the opposite of Wynn's positions.
The psychological pressure was immense. Every move was scrutinised, every loss celebrated by detractors. The hunter had become the hunted.
In a moment of clarity, Wynn attempted to walk away.
"Now decided to leave the casino with my $25,000,000 profit," he posted on May 26. "It's been fun, but now it's time for me to walk away a wynner."
Five hours later, he was spotted opening a 10x leveraged long position on PEPE worth $20 million.
The addiction was too strong. The show must go on.
The ZachXBT Allegations
As Wynn's trading losses mounted, blockchain investigator ZachXBT launched a devastating attack on his reputation.
Just as Wynn was warning followers about scam tokens bearing his name, ZachXBT accused him of hypocrisy and "gambling with stolen money" on Hyperliquid.
The allegations were specific and damning.
The Alameda Connection: ZachXBT suggested Wynn's trading capital originated from questionable sources related to the FTX/Alameda collapse, pointing to the December 2020 ETH transfer as evidence.
Pump-and-Dump Schemes: Detailed accusations of promoting low-cap memecoins before dumping them for profit, leaving followers with losses.
The BabyPepe Incident: X user Dylan published a 15-part thread claiming Wynn requested and received a private allocation of BabyPepe tokens, promoted them publicly, then sold immediately while cutting off communication with the development team.
FTX creditor activist Sunil Kavuri was blunt: "James Wynn trades like Alameda on steroids because he probably was a trader there."
Wynn denied wrongdoing but offered no detailed rebuttal to the specific allegations. The damage to his reputation was severe – and permanent.
Token Dispatch View 🔍
James Wynn represents crypto's double-edged sword – equal parts prophet and cautionary tale, embodying everything brilliant and broken about our industry.
The good: Wynn proved that genuine insight still matters in crypto. His PEPE prediction wasn't luck; it was research, conviction, and the courage to act when others wouldn't. He demonstrated that outsiders with hunger can outperform institutional players with resources. His radical transparency challenged an industry built on opacity, showing retail traders exactly how whale-level positions work in real-time.
The bad: Wynn's evolution from trader to influencer exposed crypto's most toxic dynamic – the monetisation of followers. His alleged pump-and-dump schemes revealed how easily market insight transforms into market manipulation when audiences become exit liquidity. His $100 million liquidation proved that even genuine skill becomes irrelevant when ego overrides risk management.
We've created an ecosystem where social media following equals financial credibility, where transparency becomes performance art, and where extreme risk-taking gets rebranded as "alpha generation." His destruction was livestreamed to nearly a million followers who confused gambling addiction with trading genius.
The deeper question is whether crypto's transparency creates accountability or vulnerability. Traditional finance hides institutional failures behind closed doors. Crypto broadcasts them in 4K resolution with live commentary. This isn't progress – it's voyeurism dressed up as innovation.
Wynn's story forces an uncomfortable reckoning: Are we building a financial system that rewards skill and innovation, or have we just created the world's most sophisticated casino where the house always wins and the players always perform?
The degen king fell, but the kingdom that created him grows stronger.
Are we looking at a comeback now?
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Looking at this from the sidelines, Wynn is a very smart person. The idea of gambling all this money 💰 in the publics eye was done on purpose. The community had lost faith, needed to find a way to get the trust back. Transparency! Open book! I personally already see a huge kickback from hyperliquid, a movie, his community trust, just to name a few. Take inmind that this person started all of this with only $7,000.00 worth of ETH from FTX, AKA Sam Bankmanfried. Most definitely a movie I want to watch 👁 👁.