This is the part of finance that I need to learn more about. Here's @theotherparker talking about how things are interconnected:

This was the highest volume day on $IBIT, ever, by a factor of nearly 2x, trading $10.7B today. Additionally, roughly $900M in options premiums were traded today, also the highest ever for IBIT. Given these facts and the way $BTC and $SOL traded down in lockstep today (normally SOL trades with beta) + the relatively lower liquidations on CeFi exchanges, this leads me to believe that the nexus of the problem lies with a large IBIT holder. IBIT has become the #1 venue for BTC options trading, so my guess is that a hedge fund trading IBIT options is the culprit.

If you look at the 13F filings for IBIT (I like whalewisdom dot com), you'll find a number of interesting names that have the majority of their fund in IBIT. In fact, there are a few in there (not naming names) that have 100% of their fund in IBIT, which likely means no cross margin. In fact, the biggest reason to set up a fund to hold a single asset would be to isolate margin, so that if the trade blew up, the brokers wouldn't have claim to any other assets.

Interestingly, most of these giant, single asset funds are based in HK.

We know that Asian traders, particularly in China, have been deeply involved in the Silver and Gold trade. Silver was down 20% today, which was the 2nd largest 1 day move in a very long time (largest on Jan 30). We also know that the JPY carry trade has been unwinding at an increasingly rapid pace.

This leads me to think that the culprit for the IBIT blowup today was 1 or more HK-based non-crypto hedge funds. As @FranklinBi pointed out, the fund(s) being non-crypto would explain why no one sniffed them out. They would likely have few/no crypto counterparties, meaning complete isolation from CT.

The last small piece of evidence I have is that I personally know a number of HK-based hedge funds that are holders of $DFDV, which had the worst single down day ever, with a meaningful mNAV decline. The mNAV had been holding steady surprisingly well throughout this pull back until today. One of these fund(s) could have been connected to the IBIT culprit, as I highly doubt a fund taking that large of a position in IBIT and using a single entity structure would only have the one fund.

Now, I could easily see how the fund(s) could have been running a levered options trade on IBIT (think way OTM calls = ultra high gamma) with borrowed capital in JPY. Oct 10th could very well have blown a hole in their balance sheet, that they tried to win back by adding leverage waiting for the "obvious" rebound. As that led to increased losses, coupled with increased funding costs in JPY, I could see how the fund(s) would have gotten more desperate and hopped on the Silver trade. When that blew up, things got dire and this last push in BTC finished them off.

I have no hard evidence here, just some hunches and bread crumbs, but it does seem very plausible. Let's see if some more concrete evidence floats to the surface here soon. The smoking gun will be a large fund fitting this profile filing a 13F showing a giant IBIT holding going to zero. Unfortunately, if a fund had their IBIT position liquidated today, they wouldn't have to disclose the position change until 45 days after the quarter end, so we'd be looking at mid May for the smoking gun from 13F filings most likely.

Hopefully some of you out there with too much time on your hands this weekend can snoop around more. My guess is that word will start to get out, because something of this size is just too hard to hide. Additionally, if the broker was not able to liquidate the fund in time, the broker may have a hole in their balance sheet, which would be even more difficult to hide.

Ryan Gentry added this

I often feel like I really have no grasp of how these things work.