About $2.8 billion left a Binance hot wallet and Bitcoin slid below $79,000. Whether this turns into a real crash depends on one question. Three scenarios, the key price levels for Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana and what to do now.
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Update 10:45 UTC: trail leads to North Korea, withdrawals within 48 hours. Investigators at TRM Labs attribute the Binance hack with high confidence to North Korea's TraderTraitor group, and Chainalysis points to the same group; Binance has not named an attacker. According to TRM Labs, about $6.36 billion left across ten blockchains, about $2.7 billion is frozen, and the attacker holds more than 420,000 ETH and 18,270 BTC across all wallets. Binance expects to reopen withdrawals within 48 hours; deposits work. Everything in one place: North Korea behind the Binance hack? What we know.
Update 02:30 UTC: Binance puts the damage at $6.3 billion. In an official announcement Binance estimates the total impact at around $6.3 billion, of which about $3 billion is frozen on-chain. According to the initial investigation, a DevOps engineer's laptop was compromised, which let the attacker access a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. Binance says it has found no evidence of a private key leak. The exchange will cover all losses from the SAFU fund and company funds; deposits and withdrawals remain suspended, and an updated proof of reserves will follow.
Update 01:25 UTC: Binance confirms the hack. Co-founder Yi He wrote at 00:04 UTC that user funds are safe and Binance will cover all hacking losses. Deposits and withdrawals are temporarily suspended while the exchange runs security checks, freezes funds and works with law enforcement. According to on-chain investigator ZachXBT, more than $2.83 billion is now frozen. Before the freezes, the attacker had supplied 60 million USDT to Aave and borrowed 19,762 wETH, about $45 million, against it, as Marc Zeller of the Aave Chan Initiative explains.
User funds are safe. Binance will cover all hacking losses. Deposits and withdrawals are temporarily suspended while our team conducts security checks, freezes funds, and works with law enforcement. We will share a full post-mortem once the investigation is complete. Please rely only on official Binance channels for updates.
Yi He (@heyibinance) October 30, 2026
How low can Bitcoin fall after the Binance hack? The honest answer hangs on one question: will withdrawals at Binance stay open. On Thursday night about $2.8 billion was drained from a Binance hot wallet and Bitcoin slid to $78,763 by 21:00 UTC. Measured against the roughly $144 billion that DefiLlama shows on Binance addresses, the damage is small. Markets, however, trade trust, not totals. We walk through three scenarios, the price levels that matter now for Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana, and how to act.
The minute-by-minute account of the evening is in our crypto crash timeline, the details of the drained wallet in our Binance hack report.
Is this the end of the Bitcoin bull run?
Not on Thursday's data. Bitcoin lost just under 2% in the first hour and 2.6% over 24 hours. That is a sharp pullback, not a collapse like the summer: on July 1, 2026 Bitcoin closed at $58,566 according to CoinGecko, its lowest daily close in twelve months. Since then it has gained about 35%.
The danger is not the stolen amount but a chain reaction. Almost every coin trades against Bitcoin, Ether, USDT or USDC, and Binance is the largest venue for many of those pairs. If the exchange wobbles, the whole market wobbles. That is what the three scenarios test.
Scenario 1: Binance confirms and covers the loss
This is the path co-founder Changpeng Zhao hinted at. He wrote on X that user funds are safe, while Binance says it is investigating reports of a potential security issue. Shortly after, the stablecoin issuers reported freezes: Paolo Ardoino more than 1.567 billion USDT, Jeremy Allaire more than 800 million USDC. Together that is about $2.4 billion of roughly $2.8 billion. What remains, mainly the attacker's Ether, Binance could cover from its own funds or its SAFU emergency fund, which already replaced 7,000 stolen Bitcoin in May 2019.
The blueprint is the Bybit hack of February 2025: about $1.5 billion in Ether was stolen, Bybit kept withdrawals open and closed the gap within days. Markets dipped and recovered once it was clear no customer would lose money. For Bitcoin this would mean a quick return above $80,000.
User funds are safe! It does look like a hack on Binance. Appreciate the quick freeze from Tether (~$971m) and Circle (~$823m). I don't manage Binance (.com) anymore, but as a shareholder, I expect all user funds will be fully covered.
CZ BNB (@cz_binance) October 29, 2026
Our teams are aware of reports of a potential security issue and are actively investigating. Our security teams are reviewing all relevant information with urgency, and we will provide updates through official Binance channels as soon as we have verified information. Users should remain cautious of scams and should not trust unofficial links, messages, or requests for account information.
Binance (@binance) October 29, 2026
Scenario 2: withdrawals stall and fear spreads
If Binance stays vague or withdrawals slow down, the picture changes. Customers would pull their coins, as at FTX in November 2022. The difference is huge: FTX had lent out customer money and was insolvent, while Binance's public wallets hold many times the loss. A large-scale withdrawal wave would still force selling, because traders prefer dollars to coins on a shaken exchange.
The levels that would matter come from the price history on CoinGecko:
Between Thursday's low and the August low lies about 20% for Bitcoin. That is the range the market would negotiate in this scenario. It is not a forecast but a map of the levels where buyers stepped in over recent months.
- Binance hack: how the hot wallet was drained
- On-chain analysis: what the blockchain shows about the hack
- Live ticker and timeline: the crypto crash after the hack
- USDT frozen: what Tether and Circle really blocked
- Binance withdrawals: which networks are paused
- Ethereum: the hacker sits on 195,000 ETH
- Solana below $100: is $80 next?
- BNB crash: another FTT moment?
- The biggest crypto hacks in history
- How to short Bitcoin in the crash
- Why is crypto down today?
Scenario 3: the attacker sells his Ether
Whatever Binance does, one risk remains for Ethereum. Stablecoins can be frozen, Ether cannot. According to Etherscan about 195,460 ETH sit on an attacker address, worth more than $440 million at 21:25 UTC. The address was funded with 0.1 ETH from the mixer Tornado Cash, a pattern investigators know from professional groups. Such loot is usually swapped in small tranches over days, and each tranche weighs on the Ether price.
How to act in the crypto crash now
- No leverage overnight. About $628 million in positions were force-closed within one hour on Thursday.
- Move coins to your own wallet. What sits on an exchange legally belongs to the exchange until you withdraw it. Our hardware wallet comparison shows suitable devices.
- Decide in advance. If you buy in tranches, use the levels in the table as buy zones. If you want protection, set a stop-loss before the price reaches it. How to hedge with a short is explained in our guide how to short Bitcoin.
- Wait for the signal from Binance. An official statement and normal withdrawals matter more than any chart. Asian trading starts around midnight UTC.
Where analysts see Bitcoin by year-end is collected in our Bitcoin price prediction, the bigger picture in Why is crypto down today? This article is not investment advice. Crypto assets are highly volatile and you can lose your entire investment.
FAQ: what happens after the Binance hack?
Transparency note: This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by our editorial team before publication. All figures and claims were checked against the primary sources linked in the text. The feature image was generated with AI.
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