Binance sets aside $6.34B to cover record hack

Binance sets aside $6.34 billion to cover the record $6.3 billion hack. Plus: Wall Street analysts see a buying opportunity, and experts debate the $3 billion in asset freezes. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Friday, October 30, 2026 Binance arranges $6.34 billion to cover losses from record crypto hack Binance says it has set aside more than $6.34 billion of its own money to restore customer balances after attackers drained an estimated $6.3 billion from its hot wallets late Thursday, the largest crypto theft ever. About $5 billion is already held in the exact tokens that were taken, and the rest is being bought on public markets and over the counter. Separately, Binance says partners have frozen about $3 billion of the stolen assets. Withdrawals remain paused pending security checks while deposits stay open. Binance first blamed a compromised engineer’s laptop, then said it found additional exploit points but still sees no evidence that wallet private keys were stolen. Chainalysis and TRM Labs have linked the attack to North Korean hackers with high confidence. Read more → Markets Wall Street analysts urge investors to buy crypto stocks after $6.3 billion Binance hack Analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald, TD Cowen and Compass Point say the Binance hack is a serious blow but unlikely to derail the broader crypto market, and that Friday’s selloff could be a buying opportunity. Coinbase and Strategy shares fell 12% and Robinhood about 9%; Cantor’s Ramsey El-Assal says he would be buyers on weakness. TD Cowen argues the hack exposed weaknesses at Binance, not in bitcoin’s technology, while Compass Point thinks Binance has enough liquidity to cover the hole but expects pressure on stablecoin supply and withdrawals from decentralized lending platforms. Rivals such as Coinbase, Bullish (CoinDesk’s parent company) and Hyperliquid could pick up business. For bitcoin, Compass Point is watching the $75,000–$77,000 range. 2-minute read → Finance Experts divided over Binance hack asset freezes, warn recovery is another matter Tether froze more than $1.56 billion in USDT and Circle about $823 million in USDC, with Ripple and World Liberty Financial also freezing assets, within hours of the Binance hack. Experts largely backed the move, but some ask why smaller victims rarely get the same help — Circle’s CEO said in April the firm freezes USDC only when directed by law enforcement or a court, and it faced criticism over the roughly $290 million Drift hack that month. Lawyers also stress that a freeze isn’t recovery: ownership still has to be established, and about $1.4 billion in stolen bitcoin, split across 19 wallets, can’t be frozen at the network level. 4-minute read → Know someone who should be reading this? Share this newsletter See all of CoinDesk’s newsletters    CoinDesk, Inc., 61 9th Avenue, 5th Floor, New York,NY,10011,USA, Unsubscribe Manage Preferences   Copyright © 2026 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.

After the $6B Binance hack, bitcoin traders rushed to hedge

A hacker walked away with more than $6 billion from Binance, and bitcoin options traders rushed for downside protection. Plus: how the attacker did it, and where the stolen bitcoin sits. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ SPONSORED BY Friday, October 30, 2026   A day after we noted bitcoin investors buying insurance against a price drop, that bias strengthened after a hacker walked away with more than $6 billion in crypto assets from Binance, the largest crypto exchange. In the eight hours since the hack, Paradigm, the institutional liquidity network, traded around $590 million in notional bitcoin options blocks, about half of the block volume on Deribit over the same period, and the flow was lopsidedly bearish, with most of it in puts. Paradigm’s Nicolas Quatravaux says the buying sat close to the current price, at strikes of $74,000 to $78,000, which suggests conviction hedging against a deeper near-term pullback rather than lottery-ticket bets on a crash. Bitcoin is trading near $77,300, down more than 3%, and Standard Chartered warned that weakness may persist until details of the hack emerge and exchanges and protocols unfreeze the coins involved. Stay alert. Read today’s full report → Market snapshot As of 9am ET Asset Price 24h BTC $77,337 −3.57% ETH $2,231 −4.03% SOL $96.74 −3.82% XRP $1.25 −3.31% Prices approximate. Visit coindesk.com/price for live data. A message from Hex Trust Founded in 2018, Hex Trust is the regulated digital asset partner for institutions that want to do more than just hold. More than 600 funds, banks, family offices, foundations, payment firms and OTC desks rely on us to safeguard, move and grow their assets, all with one licensed provider. Our custody gives clients the protection of cold storage without the wait. Assets stay offline and fully secured, and transactions still go out instantly. Around custody, we’ve built the services institutions actually use: OTC trading, staking, fiat on and off ramps, payments, and Aura, our wealth platform for private clients. Hex Trust is licensed in Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai, so partners can grow across Asia and the Middle East with one compliant counterparty instead of piecing together several. Learn More What matters today Tech   Story 1 of 3 Here’s how an Ethereum upgrade helped drain part of Binance’s $6 billion loss An attacker used EIP-7702, an Ethereum feature that went live in May 2025 with the Pectra upgrade and lets ordinary wallets run smart-contract code, to drain about $2.5 billion in ether and tokens from a Binance wallet in less than four minutes on Thursday, part of the roughly $6.3 billion Binance says was stolen across several blockchains. A single transaction carried 50 authorizations signed by a Binance wallet that Etherscan labels “Binance 14,” each pointing it at a sweeper contract only the attacker could operate, and the network accepted the one whose transaction counter matched. The attacker moved about 167,464 ETH and 63 tokens, including roughly $1.6 billion in USDT, swept later deposits as Binance’s systems kept routing them in, and pulled 823 million USDC from a separate Binance wallet, TRM Labs said. The malicious delegation stayed active for nearly four hours before the wallet revoked it. How the attacker obtained valid signatures is still under investigation: Co-CEO Richard Teng said preliminary findings pointed to a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, with no evidence that private keys leaked, and Binance later said investigators had found additional points of breach. Binance has pledged to cover all losses with its SAFU emergency fund and company funds. Read more → Markets   Story 2 of 3 Binance hacker splits $1.4 billion of bitcoin into 19 wallets that no one can freeze The attacker who drained Binance late on Thursday split 18,270 stolen bitcoin, worth about $1.4 billion, into 19 wallets within minutes and then left them alone. The coins moved from Binance’s hot wallet to one address in 11 transactions, then through a peel chain that carved off 1,000 BTC at a time: 17 wallets now hold exactly 1,000 BTC each, one holds 832.5 BTC and one holds 437.7 BTC, and as of 04:23 UTC Friday none had sent a coin onward, according to a CoinDesk trace of the blockchain. That is more than two and a half times the 7,000 BTC Binance lost in its 2019 hack. Stablecoin issuers can blacklist addresses within hours, but bitcoin has no issuer to do that, so the coins can only be stopped once they reach an exchange, an over-the-counter desk or a swap service. TRM Labs attributed the theft to North Korea’s TraderTraitor unit with high confidence, noting that after the $1.5 billion Bybit theft in February 2025 the same unit spent about 10 days turning stolen ether into bitcoin. Binance puts the total damage at $6.3 billion, and deposits and withdrawals remained suspended. Read more → Policy   Story 3 of 3 Crypto’s longtime foe, North Korea’s Lazarus Group, likely behind Binance hack: blockchain sleuths Several blockchain sleuths and analysis firms say a North Korean hacking unit appears responsible for the theft of more than $6 billion in crypto from Binance, though the attribution is not definitive. Investigator ZachXBT said the attacker was likely Lazarus. TRM Labs said TraderTraitor, a subunit of Lazarus, was likely behind the hack and that it had high confidence in that assessment, and Chainalysis CEO Jony Levin said his firm assessed the hack was likely done by TraderTraitor, citing links to a previous hack. Blockaid’s Ido Ben-Natan said the tactics and sophistication are consistent with DPRK operations, which he noted have been tied to several major crypto hacks this year. An individual familiar with crypto investigations told CoinDesk that very few actors could pull something like this off but cautioned that the attack had not been definitively attributed, adding that Lazarus and other DPRK groups are usually faster and more efficient at moving and selling stolen funds than the Binance hackers were. Binance said in a late Thursday update that it had traced the attack vector to a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop. Read more → CoinDesk Disclosure: The information contained in this newsletter, and any information linked through the items contained herein, is not intended to provide sufficient information to form the basis for an investment decision. You should seek additional information regarding the merits and risks of investing in any cryptocurrency or digital assets. L1.co Disclosure: This material is for informational purposes only, and the content contained herein should not be considered investment advice or a solicitation, offer, or recommendation to sell or buy any asset, strategy, or product. Investing in digital assets involves a high degree of risk, including the loss of principal. Crypto Daybook Americas: A newsletter from CoinDesk Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here.  Copyright © 2026 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.  CoinDesk, Inc., 61 9th Avenue, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10011, USA Unsubscribe Manage preferences

NYSE’s owner is bringing Hyperliquid perps to the U.S.

NYSE owner ICE moves to bring Hyperliquid perpetual futures to the U.S. Plus: Druckenmiller backs the venture in his first X post, and KuCoin exits Russia and Belarus. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Thursday, October 29, 2026 NYSE owner takes steps to bring Hyperliquid perpetual futures to U.S. Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, is teaming up with Trade[XYZ], the largest builder of markets on decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, to bring perpetual futures to the U.S., subject to CFTC approval. Perpetuals are contracts with no expiration date that are heavily traded in crypto, but mostly on offshore venues U.S. investors can’t use. The planned ICE[XYZ] venue would have its own exchange and clearing infrastructure and list 24/7 contracts on stocks, indices, commodities, currencies and crypto through participating brokers. Timing and eligibility haven’t been announced. Trade[XYZ]’s Hyperliquid markets have topped $650 billion in volume in just over a year and will keep running alongside the U.S. venue; ICE is also making a strategic investment in the company, on undisclosed terms. Read more → Finance Stanley Druckenmiller’s first X post backs Hyperliquid venture after $23 million indirect investment Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller made crypto the subject of his first post on X, revealing he’s an investor in Trade[XYZ] without disclosing financial details. Elon Musk replied with a one-word “interesting,” and Trade[XYZ]’s pseudonymous founder pitched him on bringing its perpetual futures to X — though there’s no sign the companies are in talks. The post came as ICE announced its Trade[XYZ] partnership. Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Family Office also held 2.94 million shares of Hyperliquid Strategies, a HYPE-focused treasury company, worth $23.15 million as of June 30. The HYPE token was up nearly 20% on Thursday. 3-minute read → Policy KuCoin exits Russia and Belarus as crypto exchanges withdraw from Western-sanctioned markets KuCoin is ending all services for customers in Russia and Belarus, effective immediately, citing legal and regulatory requirements without naming specific sanctions. Users will be notified of deadlines to close positions and withdraw funds, and the exchange didn’t say how many customers are affected. It follows MEXC, which stopped serving both countries on Oct. 20, and Bitget, which announced restrictions this month. KuCoin has its own compliance history: it agreed to pay nearly $300 million in January 2025 after pleading guilty to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business in the U.S. 2-minute read → Know someone who should be reading this? Share this newsletter See all of CoinDesk’s newsletters    CoinDesk, Inc., 61 9th Avenue, 5th Floor, New York,NY,10011,USA, Unsubscribe Manage Preferences   Copyright © 2026 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.