House Panel Expands Insider-Trading Probe to Three Crypto Platforms

After President Trump’s post on October 10, 2025 saying China would face 100% tariffs, crypto prices collapsed. According to House Oversight Chairman James Comer, a Hyperliquid trader had already bet on that decline.

The wager has now pulled three more platforms into Congress’s insider trading investigation. On Tuesday, Comer sent letters to Hyperliquid, Crypto.com and Aristotle Exchange, which owns PredictIt.

Comer Seeks Details on $1.1 Billion Bet

The letter to Hyperliquid CEO Jeff Yan does not identify the trader. It says the short position was opened before the tariff news had become public.

“I’m expanding the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into insider trading on prediction markets,” he said.

An Investing.com analysis identified the day’s most-tracked Hyperliquid short as a roughly $1.1 billion position in Bitcoin and Ether. The wallet had reportedly added to it one minute before Trump’s post. That move earned more than $150 million as $19 billion in leveraged bets were wiped out.

Blockchain investigators connected the wallet to Garrett Jin, a whale and former BitForex chief executive. Jin rejected the insider-trading allegation, saying he was trading for a client.

1/ An investigation into the alleged identity of the mysterious Hyperliquid/Hyperunit whale, who holds over 100,000 BTC. Recently, he sold over $4.23B in BTC to acquire ETH and is the same person behind the $735M BTC short order placed on the same platform.

— Eye (@eyeonchains) October 11, 2025

All Hyperliquid trades are recorded on a public blockchain. The wallet can be seen by anyone, but the person behind it cannot.

“This transaction, precisely timed to a nonpublic government decision, executed on a platform with apparently no identity verification or mechanism to refer the responsible party to U.S. law enforcement, mirrors a pattern of insider trading the Committee is investigating across the prediction market sector,” CNBC reported, pointing to an excerpt in Comer’s letter.

What the Three Platforms Must Do Now

Through its regulated prediction division, Crypto.com enables U.S. customers to place bets on politics, sports and the economy. PredictIt has been offering political betting since 2014.

In May, Kalshi and Polymarket were Comer’s first targets. The context for the probe also includes a soldier charged in April with using inside information to make about $400,000 on Maduro bets. George Santos, meanwhile, received a lifetime trading ban from Kalshi after he bet on his own State of the Union appearance.

“As online prediction platforms grow and become more mainstream, some bad actors have exploited the platforms to make thousands of dollars by placing bets based on nonpublic information,” Comer added.

All three are required to turn over their Know Your Customer (KYC) identity-verification procedures and describe how they detect suspicious trades.

Kalshi and Polymarket have already provided close to 1,000 documents.