World’s Fifth Most Successful Crypto Investor Loses IDR 671 Billion, How’s That Possible?

Todaysgist, News The world’s 5th most successful crypto investor, James Fickel is facing huge losses.

Launch News.bitcoin.comWednesday (18/9/2024) James Fickel suffered a loss of up to USD 43.7 million or IDR 671 billion in the BTC/ETH pair due to crypto market volatility, according to the Lookonchain report.

Fickel first started trading crypto in January 2024 and continued until July, where he borrowed 3,061 Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), worth around USD 172 million or IDR 2.6 trillion from Aave.

He then exchanged this WBTC for 56,445 ETH at an exchange rate of 0.05424. At that time, market conditions were relatively favorable, but conditions changed rapidly, causing Fickel’s strategy to fail.

He quickly formulated a new plan and started buying and trading WBTC in August 2024, despite continuing to suffer losses.

At that time, he spent 12 million USDC to buy 211 WBTC tokens, which he then exchanged for 16,000 ETH to buy another 671 WBTC worth USD 39.9 million or Rp. 612.6 billion to pay his debt to Aave.

He exchanged this ETH for WBTC at an ETH/BTC exchange rate of USD 0.042, which was a losing transaction.

However, the losses did not stop there as the price of Ethereum continued to decline, pushing it towards even higher losses.

As is known, Ethereum has been underperforming compared to Bitcoin since the beginning of the year. In addition, the price of ETH relative to Bitcoin has dropped by 24% YTD and 9% in the last month alone. With this, it lost USD 43.7 million or 18,000 ETH.

According to Arkham Intelligence, James Fickel still holds crypto worth USD 400 million or IDR 6.1 trillion. Interestingly, all of these investments are in Ethereum derivatives.

However, all of these holdings are locked because the crypto investor still owes USD 130,964,731.17 or IDR 2 trillion from Aave.

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