After last week’s record cyber theft at the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, traders who had prepared for the worst instead watched bitcoin perform an unexpected "feat": defying gravity. Bloomberg reports, writes UNN.
Details
The original cryptocurrency was little changed on Monday, November 2, trading at around $78,000 at 8 a.m. London time. It was down about 5% from Thursday’s high, before Binance reported a hack in which $6.3 billion worth of assets were stolen. The token’s resilience is largely attributed to Binance’s swift response, as the exchange pledged from the outset to cover all losses, the publication notes.
Binance recovered 90% of the assets worth $6.3 billion stolen during the attack01.11.26, 13:23
"Bitcoin’s ability to hold its position over the weekend is essentially a vote of confidence in Binance’s statements," said Caroline Moron, co-founder of Orbit Markets. "The market is clearly convinced that Binance has sufficient funds to cover the losses."
Bitcoin was already under pressure last week because of a sell-off in risk assets, so its relative resilience highlights how differently traders view this incident compared with the last major disaster to hit one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges. During the collapse of FTX, the second-largest exchange, in 2022, bitcoin fell 19% in three days, as the company led by former billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried went from a liquidity shortfall to bankruptcy.
Sean McNulty, a derivatives trader at market maker AQC Tech, said one reason bitcoin is holding up better this time is that Binance is buying back tokens to compensate users for their losses. But, he said, the overall mood remains anxious.
"People see this as just the tip of the iceberg and expect more hacks, given the capabilities of AI," McNulty said, referring to the use of artificial intelligence in cyberattacks this year. "If Binance, the world’s largest exchange, can be hacked, then no one will be safe."
As a sign of broader concern, demand is growing for short-term protection against a decline in bitcoin. According to data based on options on the cryptocurrency derivatives platform Deribit, the one-day put delta skew—a measure of how much more traders are paying for protection against a significant decline than for a bet on a comparable rise—increased by about 1 percentage point over 24 hours to 6.37 points.
Kelly Ye, head of research at trading firm Talos, said traders are reacting to the hack differently than they did to the FTX collapse, which was linked to fraud.
"The market viewed this as an operational shock rather than a systemic one," Ye said, noting that the depth of Binance’s order book fell by 25–30%, but buyers returned within a few hours. "This is a completely different picture compared with 2022, when trust in the market had completely evaporated," she said.
U.S. midterm elections on Tuesday, November 3, could have a greater short-term impact on cryptocurrency markets. A change in party control of Congress "could have significant implications for how cryptocurrency market-structure legislation develops," said Jeff Ko, chief analyst at ViaBTC.
Until last week, the largest cryptocurrency-related hack had been the 2025 hack of the Bybit exchange, which resulted in losses of about $1.5 billion. The Federal Bureau of Investigation linked the Binance and Bybit hacks to the North Korean hacker group TraderTraitor.
As with Binance, the Bybit hack initially had little impact on bitcoin. However, losses increased in the following days, causing the cryptocurrency to fall by about 14% in the week after the February 21 attack.
Regarding the latest hack, Ye noted that traders best able to detect market disruptions as they occur had spread their risks across several exchanges.
"For institutional investors, the lesson is simple: no single platform is a safe place to store risks or analyze prices," she said.