The biggest hack ever, and Bitcoin held $76K

Somebody stole $6.3 billion from Binance on Thursday, the largest crypto theft on record, and Bitcoin bottomed at $76,400. That's it. It never reached the $72,000 to $75,000 zone we've been calling as the downside target for about a month. Binance set aside $6.34 billion of its own money to cover every user, and about $3 billion of the stolen funds is already frozen. Add a Fed on pause and Fear & Greed at 30, and our Data Hub has the regime at risk-off (investors cutting risk): scared, not broken.

Snapshot

DC Research, 9:06 AM Pacific, Oct. 30. Fear & Greed 30.

The read

The scary headline met a market that was buying insurance as fast as it could. In the eight hours after the hack began, big traders bought about $590 million of Bitcoin block trades (large private option trades) on Paradigm, most of them puts (bets that pay off if the price falls) struck between $74,000 and $78,000, per CoinDesk. Bitcoin then fell into that range and stopped. Liquidations hit $1.57 billion in 24 hours, $1.31 billion of it from leveraged longs (CoinGlass), but open interest, the total of bets still open, slipped only 3%. People closed trades. They didn't run from the asset.

The bigger drag wasn't even crypto. Amazon posted the deepest cash burn in its history, Intel guided lower, and the Nasdaq was down 2.21% an hour into Friday's session (Yahoo Finance). Gold slipped back under $4,000 too. When gold, tech and Bitcoin all fall on the same morning, that's investors raising cash, not a verdict on one asset. Honestly, for the largest theft on record, that's a remarkably calm tape.

Three things that matter

• The hack didn't become a solvency event. Binance reserved $6.34 billion of corporate money, $5 billion of it already held in the exact tokens that were taken, and partners froze about $3 billion. That's why Bitcoin's 24-hour drop is about 5%, not the roughly 25% it lost in the week after FTX.

• The pullback found support, it didn't break it. The $76,400 low sits inside the $74,000 to $78,000 band where institutions bought protection, and above the $72,000 to $75,000 zone we've been watching. Lose $74,000 and that read changes.

• The Fed paused, it didn't pivot. Wednesday's 10-2 hold at 3.75% to 4% came with two votes for a hike, and the odds of a December hike sit near 85%. No rescue is coming from rates, which makes Bitcoin's hold more impressive, not less.

Binance: the biggest theft ever, backstopped in about 16 hours

At 1:05 PM Pacific on Thursday, Binance hot wallets on the XRP Ledger started emptying. Within about 20 minutes, Binance wallets on Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tron, Solana and five other networks did the same. TRM Labs traced about $6.36 billion to a single attacker and pinned it, with high confidence, on TraderTraitor, the North Korean unit behind the $1.5 billion Bybit theft in February 2025. Chainalysis and Elliptic reached the same conclusion. Binance's early read points to a compromised engineer's laptop that gave the attacker a way to submit withdrawals. It hasn't published a root cause yet.

Then the response came fast. Binance paused withdrawals, kept deposits open, and told CoinDesk it had set aside more than $6.34 billion of company resources to restore user balances one for one. Tether, Circle, Ripple and others froze stablecoins within hours, and Binance put the frozen total at about $3 billion by Friday morning. Co-CEO Yi He says withdrawals should resume by Sunday.

Bitcoin fell toward our zone, then stopped short

Here's the part we like. For about a month we've been pointing to $72,000 to $75,000 as the downside zone if Bitcoin cracked. The chart below shows where that comes from: the zone sits between two lines, the 21-week moving average (the average weekly close over the last 21 weeks) at $71,656 on Oct. 27, and the average cost of recent buyers, which Glassnode put near $75,800 on Oct. 29. The biggest hack in crypto history pushed Bitcoin to $76,400, and it never got there.

The momentum gauges are stretched to the downside, which is where selling has run out of steam before. Bitcoin's daily RSI (a 0-to-100 gauge of how hard it's been sold) hit 34.7, its lowest since June 30, and Thursday closed below its lower Bollinger Band (the edge of its normal daily range) for the first time since June 25, the day before the summer low near $57,000 (Cointelegraph, TradingView). U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $17.2 million on Thursday, their fourth straight day of inflows, per Farside, but that trading day closed before the hack began. Friday's number, the first full day after the hack, is the real test, and it isn't out yet.

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The Fed pressed pause, not play

The day before the hack, the Fed held its rate at 3.75% to 4% on a 10-2 vote. The two dissenters, Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack, wanted a hike. The statement upgraded the economy from "solid" to "strong," and Chair Kevin Warsh said financial conditions have tightened but that he's "unwilling and unable to call them tight." Thursday's data backed the hawks: third-quarter growth came in at 3.4% and core PCE inflation rose to 3.1%.

So the pause is a breather, not a turn. Markets put the odds of a hike at the Dec. 9 meeting near 85% (Bloomberg data via Yahoo Finance), and the Bank of Japan held on Friday while signaling more hikes of its own. The one bright spot: the 10-year Treasury yield fell to 4.89% on Friday, its lowest in more than a month, as money hid in bonds from the tech selloff.

From the desk

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HYPE, Hyperliquid's token, is up 18.22% over seven days on our best performers board, second only to Vertiv (VRT). This week the NYSE's parent company, ICE, announced plans to build a U.S. exchange and clearinghouse around Hyperliquid's markets. The hack added a second argument for venues that don't keep a pile of hot wallets (exchange wallets kept online for fast withdrawals), though HYPE is down 3.16% over the last 24 hours with everything else. On the other side of the board, Alphabet (GOOGL) is down 11.26% on the week after the worst day in its history.

Levels

DC Data Hub Market Pulse, 7:32 AM Pacific, Oct. 30.

This week

• This weekend: Binance withdrawals. Binance says they resume by Sunday, with a public Proof of Reserves to follow. On time removes the biggest overhang. A delay reopens the solvency question.

• Tuesday, Nov. 3: the midterms, and Iran. WTI is $104 and Brent $113 after Bloomberg reported Trump was briefed on military options against Iran, with strikes possible after the vote. Oil above $110 keeps headline inflation near 3.6% and the Fed hawkish.

• Friday, Nov. 6: the October jobs report. Above 150,000 jobs with wage growth near 4% locks in the December hike. Under 75,000 is the only print that moves the Fed back toward neutral.

Bottom line

Thursday handed Bitcoin the largest theft in crypto history, on top of a Fed that won't help and a tech selloff that won't quit. Bitcoin's answer was a pullback that stopped short of the zone we'd already marked. That's not a victory lap, and 18,270 stolen coins are still sitting in wallets waiting to move. But measured against Mt. Gox and FTX, it's the first time the industry's worst case arrived and the system around it held. The numbers to watch: $74,000 on the way down, $80,000 on the way up.

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Talk next week,

Discover Crypto Team

Prices and dominance via DC Research (CoinGecko, Twelve Data) at 9:06 AM Pacific, Oct. 30; performers and the ETF chart via DC Research at 8:53 AM Pacific; Fear & Greed via Alternative.me. Levels and regime via the DC Data Hub Market Pulse (7:32 AM Pacific). Hack timeline and attribution via TRM Labs, Chainalysis and Elliptic; reserve, options flow, BTC low and wallet trace via CoinDesk; frozen total and withdrawal timing via Binance, reported by Yahoo Finance. Liquidations via CoinGlass; RSI and Bollinger via Cointelegraph and TradingView. ETF flows via Farside Investors and SoSoValue. Short-term holder cost basis via Glassnode (CryptoSlate). 21-week average via BitcoinStrategyPlatform.com. Fed decision via the Fed statement and press conference; hike odds via Bloomberg data (Yahoo Finance). Oil via Trading Economics and Bloomberg. Discover Crypto Market Reports of Oct. 29 and 30. Education, not financial advice.