Morning Minute: Binance’s $6.4B Hack Overshadows Hyperliquid’s Biggest Day

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our daily news show 'FOMO HOUR' covering all of the top stories and market action.

GM!

Today’s top news:

Crypto majors rebound fall 1-2% alongside stocks; BTC at $77.5k

Binance hacked for $6.4B by NK, roughly half frozen; Binance to cover losses out of SAFU fund

AAVE forced to freeze v3 and v4 markets on Ethereum after attacker used them

Polymarket paused trading after front-end extension hacked, leading to user losses

HYPE soars after NYSE partnership, Druckenmiller and Elon touts

Binance’s $6.3 Billion Hack Overshadows Hyperliquid’s Biggest Day

Someone stole about $6.4 billion from Binance. That is, by a wide margin, the biggest crypto theft that has ever happened, four times the $1.5 billion taken from Bybit in February 2025.

The money left across three different blockchains: roughly $3.5 billion in ETH, $1.4 billion in BTC, and $630 million on Tron (final accounting still underway).

Luckily, stablecoin issuers can freeze their own tokens; it’s a kill switch built into USDT and USDC. Tether and Circle used it, locking up about $2.39 billion between them. That’s 43% of the haul. That leaves somewhere between $2.6 and $3.2 billion still out there.

Aave also stepped in, freezing its V3 and V4 markets on Ethereum. That’s precautionary, given the worry is an attacker using stolen money to borrow against and leave the protocol holding bad debt.

As this was playing out, Binance stated it’s “aware of reports of a potential security issue” and that user funds are “completely safe,” and paused withdrawals on multiple networks. The clearest comment came from CZ, who no longer runs Binance but is its largest shareholder: it “does look like a hack,” and he expects user funds to be “fully covered.” Later in the evening, Binance announced that it has reserved over $6.34B in company funds to cover losses. So funds are indeed “safu.”

ZachXBT shared that the Binance hack funds were commingled with funds from the $388M Bitget exploit, leading him to believe it’s the same hacker group out of North Korea behind the attack. As for how it happened, Binance pointed to a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop which was compromised, allowing the attacks to submit the unauthorized transactions, before identifying "additional points of breach" in the following hours.

Markets did what you’d expect. Bitcoin fell below $797,000, ETH fell sub-$2,200 and BNB sub-$700. Over $1.33B in positions got liquidated on the day.

Unfortunately, this came after what was shaping up to be one of the most positive days for a crypto project in its history.

Earlier on Thursday, Trade.xyz announced that Intercontinental Exchange (the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange) is investing in it. The plan is a regulated U.S. venue offering round-the-clock perpetual futures built on Hyperliquid: stocks, indices, commodities, currencies and crypto, with its own exchange and clearing setup, pending CFTC approval.

Stanley Druckenmiller is joining as well, the first of a small group of outside market figures. He already owns the trade; his family office disclosed a $23 million position in Hyperliquid Strategies earlier this year.

So Hyperliquid has its path to a fully regulated perps offering inside the U.S., claims Stanley Druckenmiller as an investor (and a tout on X), and ICE’s CEO said that Hyperliquid was “bigger than NASDAQ.” Doesn’t get much better than that.

HYPE shot as high as $97 on the day, up more than 20% at peak, before falling to $89 in the Binance hack aftermath. As of this morning, it’s at $93 and still up 8% on the day.

Unfortunately, now we have to deal with the Binance hack aftermath. Hyperliquid is a likely winner as a primary DEX option vs CEXs like Binance (which will likely be less trusted now.) But there’s also a good chance of the entire market being dragged down by fears of more exploits looming.

We will find out soon enough. Expect a bumpy ride…

Macro Crypto and Markets

Crypto majors are red in the Binance hack aftermath; BTC -3.6% at $77.5k; ETH -4% at $2,235; SOL -4% at $97; HYPE +8% at $92; ZEC -2% at $1,250

Top alt movers include PEPE (+8%), SKY (+5%) and ZRO (+2%)

Oil +2% at $104; Gold -1.2% at $3,980

Stock futures are red after Amazon fell 12% post-earnings; DOW flat, Nasdaq -2.6%

Aave froze every DAO-operated V3 and V4 market (292 reserves across 16 networks) after a wallet tied to the Binance exploiter deposited $60 million in USDT and borrowed 19,762 WETH worth about $44.6 million in a three-minute window

Coinbase posted $719 million in Q3 profit against analyst expectations of a 15-cent loss, though about $715 million of it came from gains on crypto the company holds

Walmart, Eli Lilly, Cigna, Carnival and Arcos Dorados blocked tokenized versions of their shares on the OKX-ICE venue, taking the count to 38 in two weeks

Crypto groups have spent about $176 million across more than 100 midterm races, with Fairshake and its affiliates accounting for $150.8 million through October 20

Roughly $11 billion in Bitcoin options expire on Deribit Friday, about 135,000 BTC and a third of open interest, with max pain at $78,000 against a market near $81,500 and calls outnumbering puts nearly two to one

Trezor told anyone who bought one of its wallets from reseller CryptoBilis since March to move their funds immediately, after a customer in Indonesia reported finding an extra circuit board inside a Safe 5 with a cellular module that reads whatever the screen displays

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

The Bitcoin ETFs saw $17M in net inflows on Thursday; the ETH ETFs saw $105M in net outflows

Strategy reported $19.53 billion in Q3 net income, nearly all of it a $20.91 billion paper gain on Bitcoin

Meme Coin Tracker

Meme leaders were mostly red; DOGE -4%, SHIB -3%, PEPE +8%, PENGU -8%, TRUMP -8%, SPX -10%, BONK -4%

Robinhood chain leaders were red; Pons -15% to $160M; Cashcat -10% at $90M; AI -12% at $63M; Index +50% led top movers

Solana top movers included Hyperchan +40x, Purr +50%, and GTA6 +25%; Stonk -8% to $105M

Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

Hyperliquid led onchain protocols in revenue on the day with $4.87M amidst the liquidations; Papertrade was next with $2.34M, Uniswap with $1.7M and Pump with $1.69M

Polymarket paused trading after users reported funds leaving their accounts, with Hudson Rock tracing the attack to a compromised script from web monitoring service DebugBear that hunts for logged-in trading sessions

Polygon brought its Open Money Stack to Solana, letting businesses on a chain that has processed over $5 trillion in stablecoin volume this year connect bank