Bitcoin Down Just 4% After Record $6.3 Billion Binance Hack

Bitcoin traded near $77,400 at 4:00 pm on Saturday, roughly 4% below its level shortly before the record $6.3 billion Binance hack began on Thursday, according to CoinGecko data. Strive CEO Matt Cole said the breach does not undermine the cryptocurrency's long-term investment thesis, while cautioning that it is too early to call a market bottom.

Speaking on Cointelegraph's Chain Reaction on Friday, Cole framed the incident as a theft from a custodian rather than a failure of the underlying protocol. He compared the attack on Binance's wallets to a bank robbery. "I do have conviction that over any reasonable time frame, this does not change the investment thesis on Bitcoin," Cole said.

That conviction carries weight. Strive, a publicly traded company that holds Bitcoin on its balance sheet, reported owning 43,000 BTC as of Oct. 23 — a position worth several billion dollars at current prices. The firm also recently closed a $630 million SATS IPO, though it left the Bitcoin allocation unspecified. A chief executive talking his book is routine; a chief executive holding 43,000 BTC while urging patience deserves a skeptical ear.

Cole acknowledged that Bitcoin's decline was less severe than he expected given the scale of the breach and broader market weakness. He described the market as being in an "early spring" recovery phase that could last another six to nine months, with prices gradually rising rather than surging to new highs. A gradual recovery over six to nine months is a forecast, not a fact, and Cole offered no data to anchor it.

How does this compare with Bybit?

According to Glassnode, Thursday's Binance breach was the largest cryptocurrency hack on record, with around $6.3 billion affected — exceeding the combined losses from the next nine largest hacks. The previous record was the $1.5 billion Bybit exploit in February 2025.

The pattern is worsening, not stabilizing. Glassnode said three of the 10 largest crypto hacks have occurred since the beginning of 2025, and all three involved exchanges rather than blockchains themselves.

For comparison, after the Bybit hack, Bitcoin fell roughly 5% from nearly $100,000 to around $95,000 amid the breach and broader market volatility, according to a Bitfinex market report. Anchorage Digital data cited by CNBC put Bitcoin's average decline in the first 24 hours after previous exchange exploits at 8.3% — roughly double the drawdown seen after the Binance incident.

Paul Chapman, financial crime director at Wirex, drew the same distinction as Cole between custodian risk and protocol risk. "It's important to be clear that Bitcoin itself hasn't been hacked — this was an attack on one company's systems, not the network," he told Cointelegraph.

What actually failed at Binance?

Blockaid CEO Ido Ben-Natan said the attackers appeared to have compromised Binance's transaction signing process. Binance said Friday that it had found no evidence of leaked wallet private keys, though its investigation remained ongoing.

Blockaid's analysis identified an Ethereum transaction containing 50 signed authorizations covering different transaction counts. A matching authorization allowed attacker-controlled code to operate through the wallet. Ben-Natan argued that checks before signing could have blocked the malicious authorization.

The operational lesson is straightforward: pre-signing validation controls at major exchanges remain uneven. Binance's statement that no private keys leaked leaves the exact intrusion path unexplained, and the investigation is ongoing. Whether other exchanges adopt mandatory pre-signature checks in the coming months will reveal whether this record-setting breach changes industry practice or simply becomes the new baseline.