Blockchain records show roughly $5.643 billion in crypto moved from wallets carrying Binance labels to newly created addresses late on Oct. 29, setting off a rapid market selloff and prompting stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle to freeze at least $2.316 billion linked to the receiving wallets. Binance said customer funds were safe and that it was investigating potential security issues, but had not confirmed a loss figure or identified which transfers, if any, were unauthorized.
The transfers were quickly tagged by some on-chain monitoring labels as connected to a Binance hot wallet hacker, though such labels are not themselves proof of a breach. The scale of the movements, their concentration in fresh addresses, and the subsequent freezing actions placed the episode under intense scrutiny as Bitcoin briefly traded below $79,000.
Stablecoin freezes have restricted a large share of the assets that reached the new wallets, though they cannot stop transfers of Bitcoin, Ether, or tokens without issuer-controlled freeze functions. At the time of the reported movements, the addresses still held about 195,000 ETH, valued near $450 million, alongside roughly 16,700 BTC that had left Binance-linked wallets.
Transfers began with ethereum wallets
The first unusual transfer appeared at 20:24 UTC on Oct. 29. An address labeled Binance 14 sent 167,464 ETH to a newly created wallet, an amount Etherscan valued at approximately $388 million at the time.
The same transaction included dozens of additional assets, including about $1.6 billion in USDT. Twenty-four seconds later, another address labeled Binance 16 transferred around 28,000 ETH to the same recipient.
The flows extended across several networks. Tracked transactions from wallets carrying Binance labels totaled approximately $3.528 billion on Ethereum, $1.449 billion on Bitcoin, and $628 million on Tron. Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base accounted for a further $38 million combined.
One recipient wallet received two large USDC transfers from an address labeled Binance hot wallet 34. The first, at around 20:41 UTC, amounted to 780 million USDC. A second transfer of 43 million USDC followed at 20:59 UTC.
On-chain records also showed that the originating wallet for those USDC transfers had previously received three deposits of roughly 0.1 ETH for gas fees through Tornado Cash, a crypto mixing protocol. That detail drew attention because mixers can obscure the transaction history of funds, although it does not by itself establish who controlled the wallet or whether the Binance movements were illicit.
Tether and Circle lock more than $2.3 billion
Tether and Circle responded by blacklisting stablecoin balances associated with the destination wallets. Initial reported totals were about $971 million in USDT frozen by Tether and $823 million in USDC frozen by Circle, placing the combined total near $1.794 billion.
Paolo Ardoino, chief executive of Tether, later said that more than 1.567 billion USDT had been frozen. On-chain monitoring subsequently indicated that at least $2.316 billion in stablecoins had been locked across the addresses.
The freezes substantially reduce the immediate mobility of the stablecoin portion of the funds. USDT and USDC issuers can blacklist tokens at specific addresses, preventing them from being transferred through normal on-chain transactions. That control does not extend to native assets such as BTC and ETH, nor to many other tokens included in the transfers.
The distinction leaves a significant amount of crypto outside issuer intervention. Any party controlling the wallets could potentially move native assets through public blockchains, although large transfers from closely watched addresses would be visible on-chain and could attract further compliance actions from services receiving the funds.
Bitcoin and ether fall as liquidations accelerate
The market reaction was immediate. Bitcoin traded as low as 78,974.5 USDT during the selloff, down 2.59% over 24 hours in the supplied market data. Ether fell below $2,240, while BNB was quoted at $703.28, down 6.3% over the same period.
One-hour crypto derivatives liquidations reached $627.7 million, with long positions accounting for $606.6 million and short positions about $21 million. Bitcoin positions represented $189 million of the liquidations, followed by Ether at $157 million and Solana at $46.8 million. Total liquidations over 24 hours stood near $953 million.
The heavy concentration of liquidated long positions indicates that leveraged traders were caught by the speed of the decline. A wave of forced closures can intensify short-term price moves because derivatives platforms automatically sell collateral or close positions once margin thresholds are breached.
The wallet transfers and the price decline occurred in the same window, but the available information does not establish how much of the selling came from direct spot-market sales, automated risk reductions, or broader concern over Binance's operational status.
Polymarket reports separate service-provider breach
Earlier on Oct. 29, prediction market Polymarket paused new trading for roughly an hour after a third-party service provider was breached. Polymarket said more than 700 users were affected and approximately $2.7 million was stolen.
Its status page showed the platform entering cancel-only mode at 02:05 Beijing time on Oct. 30, with relay operations paused. Trading resumed about an hour later after Polymarket said it had identified and fixed the fault affecting Polymarket.com.
The company said it had referred the incident to law enforcement and would fully compensate affected users. No evidence disclosed by Polymarket or Binance connected that event to the later transfers from Binance-labeled wallets.
The two episodes nevertheless added to a volatile trading session: one involved a confirmed third-party compromise at a prediction market, while the other centered on multibillion-dollar on-chain transfers whose authorization had not been publicly established. Binance said further updates would follow after its teams completed verification.
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