BINANCE: SUSPECTED LARGEST HACK IN CRYPTO HISTORY
Over the past few days, everything has revolved around earnings season. But tonight, news broke that has nothing to do with earnings, and I want you to hear about it directly from me.
📊 WHAT HAPPENED
On Thursday, 29. 10. at around 21:24 our time, huge sums began leaving Binance exchange wallets for entirely new addresses. Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange.
According to an on-chain estimate cited by Decrypt, at least 5,57 billion USD left the wallets:
✅ approximately 3,51 billion USD on the Ethereum network
✅ 18 270 BTC, or about 1,44 billion USD
✅ approximately 630 million USD on the Tron network
Other estimates (The Block, Conor Grogan of Coinbase) put the figure as high as 5,8 billion USD. No one has officially confirmed the exact amount yet.
According to analysts, the attacker used an address funded through Tornado Cash, a service for obscuring the origin of funds. How they gained access to the exchange’s wallets is still unclear.
📌 WHAT IS CONFIRMED AND WHAT ISN’T
❌ Binance has not officially confirmed a hack. It has only said that it is aware of a potential security issue, is investigating it, and that users’ funds are safe.
✅ Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) wrote that it looks like a hack. He added that, as a shareholder, he expects users’ funds to be fully covered. However, he no longer runs the exchange, so this is his expectation, not a formal commitment by the company.
✅ Tether froze more than 1,5 billion USDT and Circle froze 823 million USDC. At least 2,3 billion USD in stablecoins has been frozen in total.
So headlines like “5,6 billion stolen” are getting ahead of the facts for now. A significant portion of the money is frozen, and the actual loss will be lower.
If the attack is confirmed, it will be the largest attack on a crypto exchange in history. The current record is held by Bybit, with approximately 1,5 billion USD in February 2025.
📊 HOW THE MARKET REACTED
✅ $BTC fell from approximately 80 800 USD to below 79 000 USD
✅ $ETH dropped below 2 240 USD
✅ $BNB, a token directly linked to Binance, fell as much as 9 % during the day, nearing 694 USD
✅ According to Coinglass, 628 million USD worth of leveraged positions were liquidated in a single hour, almost all of them long positions
The last point is the most important one to me. Most of the drop wasn’t caused by people selling out of fear. It was caused by the forced closure of positions opened on credit. These kinds of drops tend to be fast and sharp.
📌 WHY I’M CONCERNED
I’m not concerned about the price; I’m concerned about trust. A huge share of global crypto trading goes through Binance. Every incident like this is a reminder that an exchange is still an intermediary with risks of its own. We don’t yet know whether client funds or only the exchange’s reserves were affected. Binance has not disclosed the size of the loss or its cause.
For those of you copying me: eToro is a separate platform, and this event does not directly affect accounts on eToro. It could affect us through the price, but not the security of your funds.
📌 WHAT I’M DOING ABOUT IT
I’m doing nothing in a panic. And I’ll be honest: if this news pushed the price of $BTC or other crypto assets significantly lower, I’d be glad. We’re in an accumulation phase, and lower prices mean a better entry point for me.
My approach is simple:
* if the price falls, I buy gradually, not all at once
* I don’t buy on credit; today’s liquidations show why
* I’m watching what Binance officially says, not headlines on X
Binance already lost 7 000 BTC in 2019 and covered the damage from its own SAFU insurance fund. That doesn’t mean it will happen again. But history shows that an exchange hack and the value of Bitcoin itself are two different things.
I’m keeping an eye on the situation. When Binance publishes concrete figures, I’ll let you know.