Abraxas Buys $32M Ether to Hedge a $353M Short It Won’t Close

Abraxas’ Buy

The purchase was brought to light earlier today, with the firm acquiring 13,000 ETH in the spot market for about $32.39 million (or an implied price near $2,491 per coin). The same wallets carry a short position of 141,180 ETH on Hyperliquid, worth roughly $353.27 million.

The fund is holding both legs at once, and the spot purchases exist to blunt the pain if the short goes the wrong way. To elaborate, a market-neutral book pairs short derivatives exposure against separate holdings, aiming to earn the spread between them rather than the direction of the asset.

On perpetual futures venues such as Hyperliquid, the spread often comes from funding payments, which shorts collect whenever traders crowd the long side.

The instinct on seeing a third of a billion dollars in short exposure is to read it as a bearish call on Ethereum. The hedging behavior argues against that.

How the Position Grew Since August

The current numbers are firmly in line with a series of moves Bitcoin.com News has covered over the past quarter or so. In late August, Abraxas built a $783 million Hyperliquid short and hedged it by withdrawing 73,872 ETH, worth about $173.17 million, from Binance over four days.

At that point, the fund was one of three desks running the same playbook, with Fasanara Capital and Wintermute being the other two, holding short positions of 138,569 ETH and 3,425 BTC respectively (valued near $338 million and $265 million).

Set against that August snapshot, Tuesday’s disclosure shows an ether short that has grown rather than unwound, now at 141,180 ETH on its own book. The hedge has grown with it. Neither leg has been abandoned through several weeks of chop.

The Risk in a Market-Neutral Trade

Market-neutral does not mean risk-free, and the failure modes are specific, such as:

• The first is basis risk. A hedge only works if the two legs move together, and spot and perpetual prices can diverge sharply during violent moves, exactly when the protection is needed most.
• The second is funding. If crowded shorts flip the funding rate negative, the position stops earning carry and starts paying it, turning a patient trade into a bleeding one.
• The third is leverage on the venue itself. Hyperliquid has produced repeated blowups in 2026, including a 23x leveraged ETH short of about $100 million that sat less than 2% from its liquidation price. A hedged book is far more durable than that, but it still lives on the same rails.

Ether is currently trading near $2,480, inside the range it has held for weeks. At the same time, bitcoin’s price has stalled below $80,000 ahead of U.S. inflation data. Flat tape is the environment carry trades are built for, which may be the clearest signal in the whole position.