Abraxas Capital, an institution that gives on-chain analysts goosebumps

Author: 0xFacai

Abraxas Capital is a name that is both familiar and unfamiliar.

Familiar, because it often appears in reports on on-chain detection accounts. Withdrawing tens of thousands of ETH at once and redeeming funds that directly drain liquidity are actions that are easily noticed.

Unfamiliar, because this institution hardly operates a public image. It has no verifiable X account, nor do any employees express opinions on Twitter. Most people recognize them through the labels attached to addresses on on-chain data platforms.

From TradFi to Crypto

Abraxas started in traditional finance. The two founders, Fabio Frontini and Luca Celati, both worked at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein Bank, and in 2002 they established Abraxas Capital Management in London, initially engaging in 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, conducting Bitcoin arbitrage between European, American, and Asian markets, later gradually shifting to stablecoin arbitrage. In February 2019, Frontini met with Tether's then CFO Giancarlo Devasini and later visited Tether's banking partner Deltec Bank in the Bahamas. Subsequently, Elysium began testing USDT liquidity with small trades and gradually scaled up.

Not long after, Abraxas's Heka Funds became one of Tether's largest institutional clients. By 2021, over $1.5 billion USDT was attributed to Heka's address path, accounting for about 1.5% of Tether's historical distribution at that time; of which at least $1.05 billion entered Bitfinex, $144 million entered Binance, and $132 million entered Huobi. By 2023, Elysium traded over $1 billion USDT annually, with trading fees approaching zero.

The asset management scale of the Elysium series of funds exceeded $500 million in 2022, surpassed $1 billion in 2023, and is projected to exceed $4 billion in 2025. Among the current four fund products, the Elysium Global Arbitrage Fund has a scale of $1.5 billion, the Alpha Bitcoin Fund is $1.9 billion, the Alpha Ethereum Fund is $7 million, and the Alpha Gold Fund is $423 million.

Official introduction of Elysium Global Arbitrage Fund

The performance after fees for the dollar share in 2025 also provided a reference. Elysium Global Arbitrage Fund returned 12.41%; Alpha Bitcoin Fund returned -2.55%, while BTC fell 8.28% during the same period; Alpha Ethereum Fund returned -5.21%, while ETH fell 13.95%; the Alpha Gold Fund, established in October 2025, returned 14.63% in the last three months of that year, while gold rose 11.50%.

As of July 23, 2026, Abraxas Capital's 43 identifiable addresses held approximately $1.142 billion in assets. Among them, Bitcoin accounted for $548.6 million, Ethereum $440.5 million, and HyperCore approximately $69.34 million; there were also 26 Hyperliquid contract positions valued at approximately $70.37 million, and about $12.82 million in Hyperliquid staked assets.

These 43 addresses expanded Abraxas's on-chain profile to a much larger scope than a single trading account. The Hyperliquid address that frequently appears in on-chain detection reports is just part of the institution's public footprint.

Tether's Good Friend

The arbitration materials between Circle and Heka Funds made public in July 2026 first laid bare the capital relationship between Abraxas and Tether. On April 28, 2023, Tether's cumulative position in Elysium was approximately $500.2 million; a month later, it increased to about $504.6 million. By the time of arbitration, Tether's investment reached $800 million, accounting for about 75% of Elysium's total assets. Tether also waived the USDT minting fees for Heka. Founder Frontini testified that Tether invested another $500 million into Elysium in February 2024.

When USDC depegged in March 2023, Abraxas Capital bought discounted USDC from the secondary market and redeemed it from Circle at $1, with the redemption amount exceeding $587 million within two weeks. Circle later suspected that these transactions were helping competitor Tether expand its 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, without ruling that Abraxas Capital had manipulated the market.

On-chain capital flows extended this relationship beyond arbitration. In August 2025, $250 million USDT flowed from Tether to Abraxas's associated accounts, with part of the funds used to reduce Aave debt, and about $79 million returned to Aave at one point. From April 9 to 24, 2026, approximately $4.3 billion in newly minted USDT was attributed to Abraxas's funding network according to associated address paths.

The intertwining of capital, fees, and on-chain channels has established a relationship between Abraxas and Tether that far exceeds that of a stablecoin issuer and a regular client. Public documents do not specify whether Tether holds equity in Abraxas's management company, but its weight in Elysium's assets has reached three-quarters, making Abraxas an important institutional outlet for Tether's funds entering exchanges, lending protocols, and arbitrage markets.

Profitable Hedge Wallet

We analyzed the most well-known address of Abraxas Capital on Hyperliquid. Its 54 calculable trades yielded approximately $78.11 million in profit, with 35 wins and 19 losses, resulting in a win rate of 64.81%.

The median single position of this account is only about $520,000, but the average reaches approximately $8.45 million. The average is 16 times the median, indicating that the results are clearly dominated by a few large positions. The 31 short positions contributed approximately $77.74 million in profits.

These 54 records are just a part of the institutional hedging system, yet they sufficiently demonstrate the capacity of institutional-level accounts in the public order book.

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

On September 23, 2025, the account established a short position of approximately $19.78 million XPL at an average price of $0.7504. At that time, XPL had not yet officially launched. Two days later, Plasma launched its mainnet, and XPL's fully diluted valuation briefly exceeded $8 billion. The account closed the position four days later at an average price of $1.2255, incurring a loss of approximately $12.53 million.

Immediately after the first trade, the account re-entered a short position at an average price of $1.0491. The new position reached approximately $151.7 million, nearly eight times the previous one. After peaking on September 28, XPL fell back, and the account ultimately exited on October 17 at an average price of $0.692, realizing a profit of approximately $52.21 million.

Currently, the address holds approximately $97.82 million in ETH short positions, $51 million in HYPE short positions, $60 million in BTC short positions, $15.41 million in SOL short positions, and $2.35 million in FARTCOIN short positions. The FARTCOIN position accounts for approximately 11.07% of the entire market's open contracts, SOL for 4.33%, ETH for 4.16%, HYPE for 3.89%, and BTC for 2.13%.

One address occupies several percentage points of multiple perpetual markets, and the opening and closing of positions have become variables that the market needs to digest. But zooming out, this is still just one of the 43 labeled addresses.

On-Chain Whales

In May 2025, Abraxas completed a large-scale ETH dispatch. As of May 20, the two identified related addresses held assets exceeding $1.15 billion; from May 13 to 20, these two addresses withdrew nearly 270,000 ETH from exchanges, valued at over $690 million.

Of these, over 174,000 ETH subsequently entered Aave, Ether.fi, and Compound, valued at approximately $440 million at the time, with Aave V3 positions nearing $480 million. The ETH dispatch volume for just that week far exceeded the total nominal positions of the aforementioned Hyperliquid addresses.

From April 25, 2019, to July 22, 2026, Abraxas cumulatively deposited approximately $121.7 billion into centralized trading platforms and withdrew approximately $105.54 billion from these platforms, with total flows exceeding $227.2 billion.

The over $227.2 billion in exchange inflows and outflows has thoroughly exposed Abraxas's capital turnover capability.

Even when broken down to individual addresses, the capital flow remains impressive. In 2024, the address 0xed0c…4312 held over $216 million in assets and generated over $6 billion in trading volume through protocols like Aave, 1inch, Spark, and Compound, while transferring over $800 million to other Abraxas addresses within five months.

In the nearly 90 days of approximately $3.75 billion in ETH-related capital flow from this address, about $2.06 billion passed through Aave, Compound, and Spark. It had cumulatively deposited approximately $4.61 billion in ETH and BTC derivative assets into Aave V3 and borrowed approximately $3.01 billion in USDT. Billions of dollars cycled repeatedly between lending protocols and exchanges, forming the daily operations of this address.

The Most Expensive Advertisement

In September 2024, Abraxas redeemed $100 million USDe in about 20 minutes, temporarily exhausting Ethena's protocol withdrawal buffer funds. Twenty-five minutes later, the buffer funds recovered to $30 million. The capital dispatch of an institution inadvertently became a stress test for leading DeFi protocols.

The same scale can be seen in the lending market. In July 2025, Abraxas once controlled about 36% of USDe deposits on Aave. One Abraxas address cycled nearly $1 billion sUSDe; another address held approximately $547 million in collateral on SparkLend, and there was an address that deposited approximately 66.68 million sUSDe into Aave in a single transaction.

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

The ETH dispatch continued into 2026. From July 13 to 17, Abraxas withdrew a total of 45,996 ETH from Binance, Bybit, and Bitfinex, valued at approximately $84.39 million at the time. During the same period, approximately 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 continued to expand its ETH short positions. On July 24, the short position reached approximately 50,245 ETH, with a nominal value of about $97.82 million and an unrealized loss of about $1.14 million. Tens of thousands of ETH in spot were sent to lending protocols, while nearly $100 million in short positions hedged price fluctuations on Hyperliquid. Abraxas has the capability to mobilize tens of thousands of ETH in spot and establish nearly $100 million in public hedging positions simultaneously.

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

The mystery surrounding Abraxas has not dissipated as a result. 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.

But clearly, they do not need to manage social media. The scale of capital flow itself is the most expensive advertisement.