Abraxas Capital, the Institution Giving On-Chain Analysts Goosebumps | Meet the Hyperliquid Trader

Abraxas Capital is a familiar yet unfamiliar name.

Familiar because it is often mentioned in on-chain sleuthing reports. Whether draining tens of thousands of ETH in a single transaction or causing a liquidity crisis through fund redemptions, these actions easily catch the eye.

Unfamiliar because the firm almost never engages in public relations. It has no verifiable social media accounts and no employees sharing their views on Twitter. Most people recognize them by the labels next to their addresses on blockchain data platforms.

From TradFi to Crypto

Abraxas has its roots in traditional finance. Co-founders Fabio Frontini and Luca Celati both worked at Dresden Kleinwort Wasserstein Bank and established Abraxas Capital Management in London in 2002, initially focusing on global macro trading. In 2017, the company shifted its focus to digital assets.

Fabio Frontini

In 2018, Abraxas launched their first product, the Elysium Global Arbitrage Fund, engaging in Bitcoin arbitrage between Europe, the Americas, and Asia, later transitioning to stablecoin arbitrage. In February 2019, Frontini met with Giancarlo Devasini, the then-CFO of Tether, and visited Tether's banking partner, Deltec Bank in the Bahamas. Subsequently, Elysium began testing USDT liquidity through small trades, gradually scaling up.

Shortly after, Abraxas' Heka Funds became one of Tether's largest institutional clients. As of 2021, over $1.5 billion USDT was funneled through Heka's address chain, accounting for approximately 1.5% of Tether's historical issuance at the time; with at least $1.05 billion flowing to Bitfinex, $144 million to Binance, and $132 million to Huobi. By 2023, Elysium was transacting over $1 billion USDT annually with minimal fees.

The assets under management of the Elysium Series Funds exceeded $500 million in 2022, surpassed $1 billion in 2023, and crossed $4 billion in 2025. Among the current four fund products, the Elysium Global Arbitrage Fund has a size of $1.5 billion, the Alpha Bitcoin Fund $1.9 billion, the Alpha Ethereum Fund $7 million, and the Alpha Gold Fund $4.23 billion.

Official Website Description of the Elysium Global Arbitrage Fund

The 2025 USD share class performance figures are also provided for reference. The Elysium Global Arbitrage Fund delivered a return of 12.41%; the Alpha Bitcoin Fund returned -2.55%, underperforming BTC's decline of 8.28% during the same period; the Alpha Ethereum Fund returned -5.21%, underperforming ETH's drop of 13.95%; the Alpha Gold Fund, established in October 2025, posted a return of 14.63% in the last three months of the year, outperforming gold's rise of 11.50% during the same period.

As of July 23, 2026, the 43 identifiable addresses of Abraxas Capital collectively held approximately $1.142 billion in assets. Among these, Bitcoin accounted for $548.6 million, Ethereum for $440.5 million, and HyperCore around $69.34 million; in addition, there were 26 Hyperliquid contract positions worth around $70.37 million and approximately $12.82 million in Hyperliquid collateral assets.

These 43 addresses have expanded Abraxas's on-chain footprint to a much larger scale than a single trading account. The Hyperliquid address, most commonly seen in on-chain investigative reports, is just a part of the institutional public footprint.

Tether's Bestie

In July 2026, the public Circle and Heka Funds arbitration documents revealed Abraxas's capital relationship with Tether for the first time. On April 28, 2023, Tether's cumulative position in Elysium was around $500.2 million; one month later, it increased to approximately $504.6 million. By the arbitration phase, Tether's investment reached $800 million, accounting for about 75% of Elysium's total assets. Tether also waived Heka's USDT minting fees. Founder Frontini testified that Tether once again injected $500 million into Elysium in February 2024.

When USDC disengaged in March 2023, Abraxas Capital bought discounted USDC from the secondary market, redeemed it to Circle at $1, and redeemed over $587 million within two weeks. Circle later suspected these transactions were helping their competitor Tether expand market share and banned Abraxas Capital's account in December of that year. Abraxas Capital denied market manipulation, and the arbitrator confirmed that Circle had the contractual right to restrict the account and did not rule that Abraxas Capital manipulated the market.

The on-chain fund flow continued this relationship beyond arbitration. In August 2025, a $250 million USDT transaction flowed from Tether to an Abraxas-linked account, with some funds used to repay Aave debt, with approximately $79 million temporarily flowing back to Aave. From April 9 to 24, 2026, approximately $4.3 billion in newly minted USDT was attributed to Abraxas's fund network based on the related address path.

Capital, fees, and on-chain channels are intertwined, and the relationship between Abraxas and Tether has far exceeded that of a stablecoin issuer and a regular customer. Public documents do not indicate whether Tether holds equity in the Abraxas management company, but its weight in Elysium assets has reached three-quarters, making Abraxas a key institution for Tether's funds entering exchanges, lending protocols, and arbitrage markets.

A Lucrative Hedge Wallet

We analyzed Abraxas Capital's most prominent address on Hyperliquid. Its 54 computable transactions amounted to a profit of approximately $78.11 million, with 35 wins and 19 losses, resulting in a win rate of 64.81%.

The median of a single position in this account is only about $520,000, but the mean is approximately $8.45 million. The mean is 16 times the median, clearly dominated by a few large positions. Thirty-one short positions contributed to approximately $77.74 million in profit.

These 54 records are only a part of the institutional hedging system but are enough to demonstrate the position-carrying capacity of institutional-level accounts on the public order book.

The account's largest loss and largest gain both came from XPL.

On September 23, 2025, an account established a short position of approximately $197.8 million XPL at an average price of $0.7504 per token. At that time, XPL had not yet been officially launched. Two days later, Plasma went live, and XPL's fully diluted valuation briefly exceeded $8 billion. The account closed its position at an average price of $1.2255 per token four days later, resulting in a loss of approximately $12.53 million.

After the first trade concluded, the account almost immediately re-entered a short position at an average price of $1.0491. The new position reached around $1.517 billion, nearly eight times the size of the previous one. Following XPL's peak on September 28, the account eventually exited on October 17 at an average price of $0.692, realizing a profit of about $52.21 million.

Currently, the address holds approximately $97.82 million ETH short, $51 million HYPE short, $60 million BTC short, $15.41 million SOL short, and $2.35 million FARTCOIN short positions. The FARTCOIN position accounts for about 11.07% of the total open interest, SOL 4.33%, ETH 4.16%, HYPE 3.89%, and BTC 2.13%.

An address occupying several percentage points of multiple perpetual markets simultaneously, both opening and closing positions, has become a variable the order book needs to digest. Zooming out, this is still just one of 43 labeled addresses.

On-chain Whale

In May 2025, Abraxas conducted a large-scale ETH movement. By May 20, the combined assets of two identified addresses had exceeded $1.15 billion; between May 13 and 20, within a week, these addresses withdrew almost 270,000 ETH from exchanges, worth over $690 million.

Over 174,000 ETH subsequently entered Aave, Ether.fi, and Compound, valued at around $440 million at the time, with an Aave V3 position approaching $480 million. The ETH withdrawn in just that week far surpassed the entire nominal positions of the aforementioned Hyperliquid address.

From April 25, 2019, to July 22, 2026, Abraxas deposited approximately $121.7 billion into centralized exchanges and withdrew around $105.54 billion, totaling a flow of over $227.2 billion.

With exchange inflows and outflows totaling over $227.2 billion, Abraxas' fund turnover capacity has been thoroughly exposed.

Even when split into individual addresses, the fund flow is still significant. In 2024, the address 0xed0c...4312 held over $2.16 billion in assets, generating over $60 billion in transaction volume through protocols like Aave, 1inch, Spark, and Compound. Within five months, it transferred over $8 billion to other Abraxas addresses.

Within the last 90 days, this address has been involved in approximately $3.75 billion in ETH-related fund flows, with around $2.06 billion passing through Aave, Compound, and Spark. It has deposited about $4.61 billion worth of ETH and BTC derivative assets into Aave V3 and borrowed around $3.01 billion USDT. Billions of dollars have been circulating between lending protocols and exchanges, forming the daily routine of this address.

The Most Expensive Advertisement

In September 2024, Abraxas redeemed $100 million USDe in about 20 minutes, briefly depleting Ethena's protocol withdrawal buffer funds. The buffer funds were replenished to $30 million 25 minutes later. An institutional fund maneuver inadvertently became a stress test for a top DeFi protocol.

A similar scale can be observed in the lending market. In July 2025, Abraxas briefly controlled approximately 36% of USDe deposits on Aave. One Abraxas address cyclically held nearly $1 billion sUSDe; another address held around $547 million in collateral on SparkLend, while another address made a single deposit of approximately 66.68 million sUSDe into Aave.

Chaos Labs reminded the Aave governance forum that Aave's USDe market is mainly controlled by whales like Abraxas Capital.

The ETH fund maneuvers continued into 2026. From July 13th to 17th, Abraxas withdrew a total of 45,996 ETH from Binance, Bybit, and Bitfinex, valued at approximately $84.39 million at the time. Concurrently, around 82,300 ETH were deposited into Spark and Aave, with about 54,500 ETH entering Spark and 27,845 ETH entering Aave.

Meanwhile, the Hyperliquid address analyzed in this article continues to expand its ETH short position. On July 24, the short position reached approximately 50,245 ETH, with a nominal value of around $97.82 million and an unrealized loss of about $1.14 million. Tens of thousands of ETH were sent to lending protocols, and nearly a hundred million dollars' worth of shorts were used to hedge against price fluctuations on Hyperliquid. Abraxas possesses the ability to mobilize tens of thousands of ETH in spot transactions and establish nearly a hundred million dollars in open hedge positions.

Outside of ETH, Abraxas also holds a dominant position in tokenized gold. Abraxas holds about 86,947 XAUT across wallets, accounting for 12.3% of the supply and valued at around $400 million. At one point in June 2025, an Abraxas address contributed 99.26% of the liquidity to the Uniswap V3 XAUT/WBTC pool.

Abraxas's aura of mystery remains intact. We still do not know why it establishes each position, nor can we deduce the entire fund's strategy and performance from on-chain labels.

However, it is evident that they do not need to engage in social media. The scale of capital movement itself is the most expensive advertisement.

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia