Huang Licheng's NFT Big Clearance: How a Wealth Game Triggered a Chain Market Collapse

When Brother Ma Jii decided to exit, the entire NFT market was trembling. Once the top airdrop points leader with thousands of ETH liquidity, this top player completed hundreds of NFT liquidation trades within just a few hours, directly triggering a collective plunge in blue-chip projects.

The Root of the Problem: The Deadly Flaw in Blur’s Airdrop Mechanism

Liam Herbst, a DeFi researcher, explains that the story of Brother Ma Jii begins with Blur’s points system. According to his analysis, this top player accumulated 4% of Blur’s total bid points through bidding on multiple top projects, becoming the absolute leader on the leaderboard. Users can earn points on Blur through bidding, listing, and trading, which are ultimately converted into BLUR tokens for airdrops. This mechanism was meant to encourage market liquidity but unexpectedly led to a problem: Bid depth far exceeds the actual holdings of market participants.

On-chain data from NFT collector poof reveals a harsher truth — 20% of Blur’s trading volume comes from just 15 wallets, and 50% from fewer than 300 wallets. What does this indicate? The entire trading volume is being artificially inflated by airdrop farmers through manipulation. Every transaction incurs a 0.5% royalty fee, which is costly for ordinary players, but for large traders who bid frequently to earn airdrop points, as long as the airdrop rewards are lucrative enough, it’s worth it.

Turning Point: Seed Investors’ Sell-Off Breaks the Balance

The turning point came in late February. Two seed investors from Yuga Labs, Ovie Faruq and Mike Anderson, decided to sell 72 BAYC NFTs. This should have been a normal market adjustment, but for Huang Licheng, who had already poured millions of dollars into Blur’s bidding market, it became the first straw that broke the camel’s back.

To absorb these sold BAYC NFTs and maintain liquidity in the bidding market, Huang Licheng had to inject additional on-chain capital. Data from Lookonchain shows he exchanged 5 million USDT for ETH within 24 hours, and also sold 251,560 APE for 835 ETH, all flowing into Blur. Yet, even so, he faced an unavoidable reality: The liquidity accumulated for bidding on NFTs has created a vacuum.

Critical Point: Brother Ma Jii Starts Offloading Assets

Just hours after Liam Herbst’s warning, Huang Licheng began a large-scale dump. He sold about 136 BAYC NFTs at prices between 58-65 ETH, most of which he bought at 76-78 ETH. At the same time, 42 MAYC NFTs were also sold into the market at 14-14.5 ETH.

This move seemingly incurred losses — over 10 ETH per NFT — but overall, Huang Licheng still netted nearly a thousand ETH from this operation. The key is that his position structure has fundamentally changed: only 57 BAYC remain (34 listed for sale), and only 44 MAYC, with just 1 unlisted. He is clearing out his holdings, and doing so thoroughly.

Market Chain Reaction: Blue Chips Plunge Collectively, Lending Platforms Struggle

Huang Licheng’s decision to exit triggered predictable consequences. According to NFTGO market data, BAYC’s floor price dropped 7.8% within 24 hours, and MAYC’s fell even more sharply by 9.2%. This decline quickly spread across the entire blue-chip ecosystem, with multiple projects experiencing drops of over 5%.

A more dangerous signal comes from the NFT lending market. BAYC collateral positions on BendDAO are beginning to face risks. According to monitoring by Dune Analytics, 224 repayment transactions occurred in a single day on February 24, setting a new record. But that’s not the worst part — on-chain warning systems show that 14 BAYC are still on the brink of liquidation with health factors below 1.1. If the floor price continues to decline, these positions will face forced liquidation.

Airdrop Farmers’ Dilemma: Liquidity Traps and Collective Anxiety

The phenomenon that “bid market depth exceeds total user holdings” has become a nightmare for every airdrop farmer. Blur’s bidding mechanism allows participants to bid on multiple projects simultaneously, which means many accounts appear to have sufficient liquidity, but in reality, it’s fragmented across different wallets.

When Brother Ma Jii begins to withdraw liquidity, the system’s fragility is fully exposed. Farmers who want to continue earning airdrop points through bidding now face a dilemma: either add funds to keep bidding (which means selling other assets or front-running others to offload assets) or cut losses and liquidate. The worst-case scenario is — they are forced to take on more NFTs without being prepared to buy them.

Liam Herbst’s ideal solution is for these farmers to reach some consensus to stop offloading to stabilize prices. But in a decentralized market, this is nearly impossible. Everyone has different risk tolerances, capital pressures, and decision-making logic. Collective consensus becomes a matter of individual rational choices — sell your chips while others are still willing to buy.

The Truth: A Small Few with Infinite Offloading Power Are Controlling the Market

Looking back at the entire chain of events, a disturbing conclusion emerges: Well-capitalized big players are easily manipulating the entire market’s price movements. Huang Licheng, with his substantial assets, has almost unlimited “offloading rights.” He can decide to enter to maintain liquidity or exit to harvest profits at any time. In this process, he is neither a victim nor a malicious manipulator — he is simply following basic market logic: pursue gains, avoid risks.

But every decision he makes is rewriting the fate of thousands of small retail investors. The seed investors from Yuga Labs’ sale was just a trigger; the real power lies in how Brother Ma Jii responds — with size and capital. Now, the entire NFT blue-chip market is experiencing collective volatility driven by this big player’s moves, and the airdrop farmers are discovering that their so-called participation in the market is actually a game they can never win against well-capitalized minorities.

This wave of sell-offs exposes structural issues in the NFT market: a lack of sufficient retail holdings to support prices, leading to excessive sensitivity to big players’ actions; flaws in the airdrop mechanism that incentivize artificial trading rather than genuine value discovery; insufficient risk buffers in the lending market, prone to chain liquidations during price swings. Brother Ma Jii has not destroyed the NFT market, but his every move has fully exposed its fragility.