Binance hack reaches $6.4 billion, but Bitcoin's reaction stays muted
Security & Exploits ·
The largest crypto hack on record barely dented Bitcoin's price, a contrast market watchers attribute to how differently crypto trading is structured today.
Binance lost roughly $6.4 billion in an attack confirmed this week, with Chainalysis and TRM Labs putting the theft at more than four times the size of the $1.5 billion Bybit heist from February 2025. Bitcoin fell about 3% in response, a muted move compared with the nearly 11% drop the exchange's 2018 incident triggered within minutes, according to Decrypt. That earlier episode involved a phishing and account-takeover scheme rather than actual theft, with attackers pumping an obscure token while pre-positioned accounts sold into the spike, dragging Bitcoin from $10,740 to $9,690 in minutes.
The gap in market reaction reflects how much the crypto market has grown and diversified since then. The entire sector was worth just over $400 billion in March 2018; it is worth roughly $2.6 trillion now. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, which did not exist during the earlier hack, now hold approximately 1.3 million BTC, about 6% of total supply. Their holders do not keep coins on exchanges like Binance and are generally considered less prone to panic selling, a structural buffer that helps explain the smaller price swing this time.
A separate account of the episode describes a 5.1% weekly Bitcoin decline to $76,400, occurring alongside a Federal Reserve rate pause, according to CryptoPotato. More than $1.3 billion in leveraged positions was liquidated as the news broke, and BlackRock's Bitcoin fund still absorbed $136 million in inflows on the day of the attack, suggesting institutional demand held steady even as the exchange dealt with the breach.
Binance has said it set aside more than $6.34 billion in company funds to cover losses and is buying back missing tokens on the open market and through private deals. About $3 billion of stolen funds remains frozen, and withdrawals were expected to resume within 45 hours of the incident. The attacker reportedly still controls more than 420,000 ETH and 18,270 BTC, holdings worth about $2.4 billion that cannot be frozen by stablecoin issuers, with the total rising above $3 billion once other tokens are included.
TRM and Chainalysis have linked the attack to the North Korean group tied to the Bybit theft, which previously converted a large share of stolen funds into Bitcoin via a cross-chain swap network. Whether Friday's ETF flow data, the first clean read after the theft began post-market-close on Thursday, shows sustained institutional buying or early signs of withdrawal remains the key indicator to watch.