Crypto Liquidations Spike to $1.57 Billion Following Binance Hack

Oct 30, 2026, 7:09 a.m. EDT

4 min read

Summary

Binance reported that roughly $3 billion of the compromised funds have been locked, while cash-outs remain halted. Both TRM Labs and Elliptic pointed to hackers tied to North Korea for the breach.
Coins that the attacker previously held and liquidated led the recovery, with ethena jumping 8.4% and pepe climbing 7.3%, following a roughly 11% drop in uniswap and aave on Thursday.
Options participants adopted cautious stances, as five of the top six trading-volume bitcoin options were puts and the 25-delta skew climbed across multiple time horizons for both bitcoin and ether.

Bitcoin BTC$77,299.35 dipped to its lowest valuation since September 18 after Binance, the leading cryptocurrency trading platform, experienced a massive $6.3 billion security breach linked to North Korean cybercriminals.

The premier digital asset touched an intraday floor of $76,400 before regaining some ground. Ether ETH$2,234.53 briefly dropped to $2,170 prior to bouncing back near $2,220.

Approximately $3 billion of the stolen funds have been locked, and platform withdrawals are currently suspended. Blockchain analytics providers TRM Labs and Elliptic attributed the security incident to actors associated with North Korea.

Equity markets compounded downward pressures, with Nasdaq-100 index futures shedding 2.3% after Amazon AMZN upgraded its capital expenditure projections. Meanwhile, Intel (INTC) plummeted approximately 25% due to disappointing forward guidance.

According to Farside Investors, U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs attracted $17 million on Thursday, marking a fourth consecutive day of positive inflows prior to the exploit unfolding.

Derivatives Positioning

Liquidation spike: Futures liquidations across the digital asset space surged by four times to reach $1.57 billion after the Binance exploit impacted asset valuations. Total market turnover climbed 74% to $346.1 billion, whereas open interest (OI) contracted 3% to $136.3 billion, indicating that participants wound down positions and capital withdrew from derivatives markets. The taker buy-sell ratio displayed a slight bias toward selling following a balanced split the previous day.
BTC steady, ETH exits: BTC declined 3.1% over a 24-hour window while open interest dropped a mere 1.4%, signaling that a minor amount of capital entered during the dip. ETH retreated 4% alongside a 5.8% drop in open interest, pointing to a slight capital outflow. BTC funding rates remain positive and have climbed, implying that long positions are compensating short positions and perpetual traders maintain a bullish posture. ETH funding stays positive but has drifted lower, suggesting that bullish momentum is cooling. Together, BTC and ETH accounted for more than half of all total liquidations, tallying $522 million and $361 million respectively.
Money leaves SOL and NEAR: SOL open interest declined 13.3% against a 3.3% price correction, pointing to capital exiting SOL derivatives. NEAR showed minimal price change, yet its open interest dropped 11.8%, marking its second straight day of capital outflows. Funding rates for both assets flipped from positive into negative territory, meaning short positions are now compensating longs, while cumulative volume delta (CVD) registered negative for both, indicating market sell orders predominated.
BNB OI steady: BNB dropped 6.2%, marking the sharpest decline among major coins even though open interest remained unchanged in dollar terms. Trading turnover multiplied threefold. Funding rates turned negative, indicating shorts are paying longs, and CVD registered negative, reflecting dominant market selling pressure.
HYPE defies the selloff: HYPE advanced 15% while open interest expanded 28%, showing capital inflows while the broader market retreated. Trading volume exploded nearly eightfold. Funding rates are positive and increased, meaning long holders are paying more to maintain their exposures. CVD turned positive, confirming that market buying orders took control.
Mixed trends in funding rates: The majority of tokens continue to feature positive funding, indicating long positions compensate shorts. Nevertheless, the cohort of assets with negative funding has expanded to encompass BNB, SOL, NEAR, and TRX, where short positions now pay longs. TRX registered the most negative funding overnight, whereas Monero (XMR) posted the highest positive funding, followed by HYPE.
CVD sinks: Aside from TRX, HYPE, ZEC, XMR, and BCH, all major cryptocurrencies exhibited negative 24-hour OI-adjusted cumulative volume delta. This demonstrates that market sell orders outpaced buy orders relative to open interest across the broader ecosystem.
Defensive options flow: Five out of the six highest-volume BTC options contracts are puts, all situated below current spot pricing. The $74,000 put option expiring on November 13 leads activity. For ETH, the tilt toward downside protection is even more pronounced. The $2,000 put option maturing November 13 recorded more than double the volume of any other ETH option contract, with only a single call appearing among the top six.
Put bias strengthens: The 25-delta skew, which tracks the cost differential between puts and calls, climbed across all time horizons for both BTC and ETH, indicating strong demand for downside hedging. 30-day implied volatility benchmarks spiked across Asian trading hours as the Binance incident stimulated demand for puts, though these spikes have since partially receded.

Token talk

Assets previously held and sold off by the Binance attacker spearheaded the market recovery, with ethena (ENA) gaining 8.4%, pepe PEPE$0.0₅5221 rising 7.3%, uniswap (UNI) adding 4.6%, and chainlink LINK$11.06 climbing 3.7%. Uniswap and aave had previously tumbled roughly 11% on Thursday as the exploiter converted assets into ether, according to Lookonchain.
Aave AAVE$125.09 and arbitrum ARB$0.1640 both advanced around 4.5%, with Aave halting its lending pools across 16 different networks after the perpetrator borrowed approximately $44.6 million worth of ether against stolen USDT.
Thorchain (RUNE) gained 6.2%, with Elliptic and blockchain investigator ZachXBT tracking a portion of the illicitly obtained funds moving onto the Ethereum network via the cross-chain bridge.
LayerZero ZRO$1.7098 jumped 12%, achieving the top performance inside the CoinDesk 100 index, while curve CRV$0.2871 retreated 7.2% and tron TRX$0.3410 dropped 4.9%.
CoinMarketCap’s Altcoin Season gauge dropped to 45 out of 100 compared to 54 on Thursday, while its Fear and Greed metric retreated to 36 out of 100, entering “fear” territory from the previous reading of 43.