Bitcoin Falls Below $78,000 After Binance Hack as Exchange Targets Resumed Withdrawals Within 48 Hours

Since Binance announced the breach late Thursday, Oct. 29, the fallout has moved from the exchange's balance sheet to the broader crypto market and the courts.

Bitcoin slides, but not alone

Bitcoin fell more than 5% overnight to approximately $77,000 and was trading below $78,000 on Friday, Oct. 30. That accelerates a month-long downturn. Other cryptocurrencies affected by the hack dropped as much as 9%.

The hack was not the only pressure on risk assets that morning. Tech stocks sold off on disappointing earnings from Alphabet, Amazon and Intel, with Nasdaq 100 futures pointing to a drop of more than $1 trillion at the open. No one has tied that selloff to Binance.

Withdrawals expected back within 48 hours

Binance co-founder Yi He said the exchange is improving its withdrawal services and expects them to resume within 48 hours. Deposits, she said, "remain unaffected and continue to operate as normal."

The exchange says it has found no evidence of a wallet private key leak. Its initial investigation points to a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop that gave an attacker access to a service container to submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. Binance later said its subsequent investigation had uncovered additional points of breach, without elaborating. It has promised a detailed technical post-mortem once the facts are verified, and an updated Proof of Reserves once remediation is complete.

Binance has said it set aside $5 billion to make users whole and is working with partners to buy another $1.34 billion to cover the full amount.

What a freeze does and does not do

About $3 billion has been frozen on-chain. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said his company froze more than 1.567 billion USDT. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said Circle froze more than 800 million USDC.

Frozen is not recovered. Ari Redbord, global head of policy at TRM Labs and a former federal prosecutor, told CNBC that "a freeze stops the money from moving, and recovery follows through legal process." Law enforcement typically needs a court order or seizure warrant before issuers release or reissue assets to victims.

Stablecoins are the easiest to return because the issuer controls the token contract, Redbord said. Bitcoin and ether have no issuer to freeze them. Investigators have to trace them to exchanges and other services where they can be intercepted.

Eric Jardine, head of research at Chainalysis, said there is no standard timeline. "A technical freeze may happen quickly, while returning funds can take months or years," he told CNBC.

TRM Labs estimates that $2.4 billion in bitcoin and ether will never be recovered.

The attack's mechanics

TRM Labs attributes the attack with high confidence to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-sponsored unit that the FBI previously identified in the $1.5 billion Bybit theft of February 2025. TRM estimates about $6.36 billion moved from Binance wallets across 10 blockchains, most of it in roughly 20 minutes. Chainalysis also pointed to North Korea.

TRM says preparations began at least 36 hours before the theft, with the attackers using the Tornado Cash mixing service to fund their wallets, and that transaction signatures were obtained in advance. That matches earlier North Korea-linked incidents, according to the firm.

NBC News places the start of the heist at approximately 4 p.m. ET Thursday. The South China Morning Post, citing blockchain data, reports funds began being withdrawn from Binance wallets at about 4:24 a.m. Hong Kong time on Friday.

Washington's crypto fight

The timing is awkward for the industry. Congress has failed to pass the Clarity Act, which would have given crypto assets comprehensive legal protections in the U.S. Despite bipartisan support for the bill's core, a fight over conflict-of-interest rules for elected officials, notably President Donald Trump, sank it. Trump has disclosed in filings that he earned more than $1 billion from crypto last year.

Binance's own history is part of that picture. Co-founder Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty in 2023 to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program, served a four-month prison sentence, and received a presidential pardon from Trump last year. Zhao no longer runs the exchange but remains a shareholder. He wrote on Oct. 29 that "user funds are safe" and that it "does look like a hack on Binance."

Laura Clatworthy, head of digital assets at law firm Edwin Coe, said Binance faces an imperative to cover losses for its own reputation and value. She expects cooperation across the industry because of the collective reputational harm the hack may cause the sector, "rightly or wrongly."

AI speculation

Elon Musk wrote on X that humans were behind this hack, but that "super intelligence agents will at some point do this to gain currency for themselves, not a human." It is not yet clear whether the hackers used AI, and no investigator has said they did.

What comes next

The near-term test is whether Binance reopens withdrawals inside Yi He's 48-hour window without a fresh run on the exchange. Sean Farrell of Fundstrat Global Advisors said the key tell will be how quickly withdrawals resume and whether outflows stay orderly. The longer test is the post-mortem and the legal process for the frozen funds. Roughly half the estimated total remains unfrozen, and bitcoin and ether cannot be frozen by any issuer.