Recipe 18 of 33
Did cohort leverage rise before the last liquidation cascade?
Find the hour of the drop, then read the cohort's hourly equity_exposure and perp_bias for the hours before it from /segments/{cohort}/history with include=leverage.
GET /v1/hl-cohorts/segments/{cohort}/history with include=leverage answers it once you know the hour the price
broke. Every hourly row carries the cohort's equity_exposure (long plus short notional over its equity) and
perp_bias (long minus short over its equity), so leverage that built up before the cascade shows as a rising
number in the rows just before it. The full parameter list is on
Cohort history, and
Candles finds the hour.
Quick answer
Six hours of whale leverage up to BTC's drop in the 01:00 UTC hour of 2026-10-22.
# the whale cohort's hourly leverage over the six hours up to BTC's 01:00 UTC drop on 2026-10-22
curl -H "X-API-Key: $VIKE_API_KEY" \
"https://data.vike.io/v1/hl-cohorts/segments/whale/history?axis=size&include=leverage&start=2026-10-21T19:00:00Z&end=2026-10-22T01:00:00Z"Example response
Captured from the live API on 2026-10-24 at 17:14 UTC, trimmed to 4 rows (the window holds 7).
Rows are newest first. Whales (accounts of $1M to $2.5M) carried about 5x their equity going into the drop:
equity_exposure went from 5.06 at 22:00 to 5.30 at 00:00. perp_bias jumped from 0.13 to 0.73 at 23:00, so whales
added net long against their equity two hours before BTC fell 0.93% in the 01:00 hour (84,156 to 83,370 on the 1h
candle). equity_covered_share of 1.0 means the ratios describe the whole cohort's main-dex notional.
{
"axis": "size",
"cohort": "whale",
"label_basis": "point_in_time",
"data_from": "2026-04-07T00:00:00+00:00",
"series": [
{
"ts": "2026-10-22T01:00:00+00:00",
"long_usd": 1122340257.0,
"short_usd": 931156940.7,
"bias": 0.093101,
"position_count": 3597,
"perp_bias": 0.6365202414,
"equity_exposure": 5.210942087,
"equity_covered_share": 1.0
},
{
"ts": "2026-10-22T00:00:00+00:00",
"long_usd": 1054048914.0,
"short_usd": 973797853.0,
"bias": 0.039575,
"position_count": 3668,
"perp_bias": 0.3676219673,
"equity_exposure": 5.29808667,
"equity_covered_share": 1.0
},
{
"ts": "2026-10-21T23:00:00+00:00",
"long_usd": 1121276275.0,
"short_usd": 927721329.4,
"bias": 0.094463,
"position_count": 3639,
"perp_bias": 0.7255351722,
"equity_exposure": 5.216429072,
"equity_covered_share": 1.0
},
{
"ts": "2026-10-21T22:00:00+00:00",
"long_usd": 966591508.8,
"short_usd": 958775974.1,
"bias": 0.004059,
"position_count": 3707,
"perp_bias": 0.1288478651,
"equity_exposure": 5.060512928,
"equity_covered_share": 1.0
}
],
"has_more": false,
"leverage": {
"data_from": "2026-08-11T00:00:00+00:00",
"scope": "native perp account only; main-dex positions of wallets with a known positive native equity",
"note": "hours rebuilt from fills are null"
}
}Variations
Find the cascade hour. A week of hourly candles; the candle with the largest drop from open to close is the hour to look before (ts is
epoch milliseconds, the start of the hour).
# 168 hourly BTC candles, oldest first
curl -H "X-API-Key: $VIKE_API_KEY" \
"https://data.vike.io/v1/hyperliquid/ohlcv?symbol=BTC&interval=1h&limit=168"Who was liquidated in that hour. The liquidation fills of the hour, newest first. side is the side that was closed (long means longs were
liquidated); follow nextCursor to count the whole hour. A liquidation is inferred: a position near its
liquidation price that is gone at the next 5-minute snapshot.
# every BTC liquidation of the 01:00 hour; end is inclusive
curl -H "X-API-Key: $VIKE_API_KEY" \
"https://data.vike.io/v1/hyperliquid/liquidations?symbol=BTC&start=2026-10-22T01:00:00Z&end=2026-10-22T01:59:59Z&limit=500"The losing wallets instead of the whales. The same window on the realized-PnL ladder: 3x rekt is the bottom 5% of wallets by realized PnL.
# the 3x rekt cohort's leverage before the same drop
curl -H "X-API-Key: $VIKE_API_KEY" \
"https://data.vike.io/v1/hl-cohorts/segments/3x_rekt/history?axis=pnl&include=leverage&start=2026-10-21T19:00:00Z&end=2026-10-22T01:00:00Z"A week of baseline. 168 hours ending at the cascade hour, to see whether the level before it was unusual for the cohort.
# the whale cohort's leverage over the week up to the drop
curl -H "X-API-Key: $VIKE_API_KEY" \
"https://data.vike.io/v1/hl-cohorts/segments/whale/history?axis=size&include=leverage&hours=168&end=2026-10-22T01:00:00Z"Before you rely on it
Leverage starts on 2026-08-11 and sums every coin
perp_bias, equity_exposure and equity_covered_share are null, never 0, before 2026-08-11 and on hours rebuilt
from fills, so a cascade before August has no leverage to compare. The series sums the cohort over every symbol, not
only the coin that fell. Equity is the native perp account only: builder-DEX positions are left out, and
equity_covered_share says how much of the cohort's notional the two ratios describe.
The newest hour is not final yet
Only settled hours are served, so a cascade happening now has no row yet. The newest row can still change after it first appears: in two reads four minutes apart on 2026-10-24, the whale cohort's 16:00 row moved from $1.164B to $1.143B long and its three leverage ratios turned null. Read the hours before a cascade once they are a few hours old.
Ask your agent
Connected to the Vike MCP server (https://vike.io/mcp) in Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, ask it in plain words.
The hl_segments tool answers (view history), with hl_liquidations for the liquidations and hl_ohlcv for the drop, at 1 credit a call each.
Did Hyperliquid whales' leverage rise in the six hours before BTC dropped at 01:00 UTC on 2026-10-22?