Crypto week in review 44/2026: Binance hack, BTC down 2.3%

Hackers took about $6.3 billion from Binance hot wallets on Thursday 29 October, the largest crypto theft on record, on a day when a tech sell-off and forced liquidations had already pushed bitcoin below $80,000. Bitcoin ended the week down 2.28%, ether down 2.36%, XRP down 3.51% and solana down 6.76%.

Pair	Open	Close	Change	Note
BTC/USD	80053	78231	-2.28%	Weekly high 81,890 on Thursday, low 76,141 on Friday (Coinbase, UTC days)
ETH/USD	2327	2272	-2.36%	Low of 2,170 on Friday; US spot ether ETFs lost $431.4m over 26–30 Oct
SOL/USD	101.23	94.39	-6.76%	Weakest of the four; fell 6.8% on Thursday alone
XRP/USD	1.2945	1.2491	-3.51%	Touched 1.1975 on Friday before recovering to about 1.25

This was the week the crypto market met the largest theft in its history. On Thursday evening, UTC, hackers drained about $6.3 billion from Binance’s hot wallets across ten blockchains. It happened on a day when bitcoin was already falling, pushed by weak technology shares and a wave of forced liquidations, and it was followed on Friday by the biggest daily outflow from US spot bitcoin ETFs since June. By Sunday, Binance had begun reopening withdrawals and said it had replaced about 95% of the affected assets with its own funds.

Net weekly price changes were smaller than the headlines suggest. Bitcoin fell 2.28%, ether 2.36%, XRP 3.51% and solana 6.76%. Most of the damage was done on Thursday and early Friday, and prices drifted back over the weekend.

All four coins can lose most or all of their value, and these moves are a reminder of that. Crypto-assets are largely unregulated outside the scope of the EU’s MiCA regulation, and the CFD versions offered to retail clients carry the same loss rates as other CFDs: brokers typically disclose that between 61% and 89% of retail accounts lose money. Nothing below is a forecast or a recommendation.

How the figures were measured. Weekly open and close prices below are Coinbase Exchange USD prices, using daily candles in UTC: the open is the first trade at 00:00 UTC on Monday 26 October, and the close is the last price at 23:59 UTC on Sunday 1 November. Highs and lows are for the same window. Crypto trades all weekend, so a Friday-to-Friday comparison would miss two days; other venues and data providers will show slightly different numbers. We cross-checked the moves against Binance’s USDT weekly candles, which moved in the same direction by similar amounts. ETF flows are from Farside data as reported by crypto.news; liquidation figures are from CoinGlass as reported by 24/7 Wall St and Crypto Briefing; hack details are from TRM Labs, CoinDesk, CNBC, Reuters (via NBC News) and investingLive.

Day by day

Monday 26 to Wednesday 28 October: a quiet start

The first three days were calm. Bitcoin opened the week at $80,053 and edged up to close on Wednesday at $81,249, a gain of about 1.5%. Ether, solana and XRP followed a similar path and all made their weekly highs on Wednesday: ether at $2,389.59, solana at $103.77 and XRP at $1.3431. Money was still flowing into US spot bitcoin ETFs: $110.3 million on Monday, $176 million on Tuesday and $137.3 million on Wednesday, according to Farside data cited by crypto.news. Spot ether ETFs, by contrast, had outflows every day.

On Wednesday at 2:00 pm New York time (18:00 UTC), the Federal Reserve kept the federal funds target range at 3.75–4.00%. The vote was 10–2: Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed president Beth Hammack wanted a quarter-point rise. The statement said inflation remains elevated and that economic activity is expanding at a strong pace. Markets read this as a hawkish hold, meaning no change now but a tilt towards higher rates. Our forex week in review 44/2026 covers the decision and the other central banks in detail, and the markets week in review 44/2026 covers the equity side.

Crypto did not react much on Wednesday itself. Bitcoin finished the day near its high for the week.

Thursday 29 October: tech weakness, liquidations and the hack

Thursday was the decisive day. Bitcoin opened at $81,249, briefly touched its weekly high of $81,890, and then fell to close at $77,780, a drop of 4.27% on the day. Ether fell 4.61%, solana 6.82% and XRP 6.77% on the same UTC day.

The sell-off began well before the hack. The Motley Fool reported that weakness across technology stocks weighed on sentiment on Thursday, and that the three largest cryptocurrencies were under pressure in a broad risk-off tape. By early evening in New York it reported bitcoin down about 1.2% at $80,298, with roughly $356 million of crypto futures liquidated, according to CoinDesk data. That would turn out to be only the start.

At about 20:05 UTC, according to TRM Labs, Binance hot wallets on the XRP Ledger, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tron, Solana, Arbitrum, Optimism and Base began sending their balances to addresses controlled by a single attacker. Most of the roughly $6.36 billion left within about 20 minutes, and a second wave hit Binance wallets on Avalanche and Polygon at about 23:05 UTC. CoinDesk reported that 18,270 bitcoin left Binance’s hot wallet at 20:20 UTC in 11 transactions and was split into 19 wallets within the same block. TRM Labs said it had high confidence that North Korea’s TraderTraitor unit was responsible; CNBC later reported that the FBI had attributed the attack to the same group, and Reuters reported that North Korea rejected the claim.

Bitcoin’s close of $77,839 on 29 October, as measured by 24/7 Wall St’s data source, was its lowest daily close since 17 September. Our Coinbase figure for the same close is $77,780; the difference is simply a different venue.

Friday 30 October: Binance halts withdrawals, ETFs see heavy outflows

Shortly after midnight UTC, Binance said on X that it had suspended all deposits and withdrawals and that it would cover all losses from the suspected hack, according to investingLive. At about 00:15 UTC, investingLive reported, Binance’s own token BNB was trading near $694, down 8.6% in 24 hours, and bitcoin was around $77,700.

24/7 Wall St reported that bitcoin opened the UTC day at $77,783, fell to $76,600 within the first hour and found a low of $76,301 about two hours later. On Coinbase the low for the day, and for the week, was $76,141. That was 7.0% below Thursday’s high. Ether hit its weekly low of $2,170.03, solana $92.14 and XRP $1.1975.

Liquidations piled up. 24/7 Wall St, citing CoinGlass, said exchanges had closed $1.49 billion of leveraged positions in 24 hours, of which about $1.29 billion, or 86.8%, were long positions. Crypto Briefing, also via CoinGlass, put the 24-hour total at about $1.57 billion, with bitcoin around $522 million and ether around $361 million. The two figures cover slightly different 24-hour windows. Crypto Briefing reported that the Crypto Fear & Greed Index fell from 51 to around 29 or 30.

The same day, a tech-stock rout hit Wall Street. Intel fell 28.6% after weak guidance, the S&P 500 dropped 1.82% and the Nasdaq 2.86%, according to FinanceFeeds. In ETF land, US spot bitcoin funds lost $643.2 million on Friday, their largest daily outflow since June, which turned the week’s flows negative. Spot ether funds lost another $155.7 million.

Bitcoin closed Friday at $77,180 on Coinbase.

Saturday 31 October and Sunday 1 November: withdrawals resume

The weekend was steadier. Bitcoin closed Saturday at $77,424 and Sunday at $78,231, about 1.4% above Friday’s close. Binance began restoring withdrawals in phases at 06:00 UTC on Sunday, starting with bitcoin and assets on 15 networks including ETH, USDT, USDC, BNB and XRP, according to CoinDesk. By 12:36 UTC withdrawals had resumed for all 15 networks in the first phase.

CNBC reported that between 06:00 and 15:30 UTC on Sunday, Binance processed $4.65 billion of withdrawals and $1.01 billion of deposits, a net outflow of $3.64 billion, which CNBC put at 2.1% of the $171 billion in total assets shown in Binance’s proof-of-reserves data as of 28 October. Binance said it had replaced about 95% of the affected assets with company funds, and that the remaining 5% were less liquid tokens that take longer to source.

Coin by coin

Bitcoin: down 2.28%

Bitcoin opened at $80,053 and closed at $78,231. The weekly range was $81,890 to $76,141, a high-to-low swing of about 7%. For bitcoin, that range was not unusual; what was unusual was the combination of causes. A risk-off day in equities, leveraged longs being forced out and a hack at the world’s largest exchange all landed within about 24 hours. It was also the week’s ETF flows that turned: four days of inflows, then one day of heavy outflows that erased them. Our bitcoin guide explains how spot bitcoin ETFs work and what has historically moved the price, without drawing conclusions about what comes next.

It is worth noting what did not happen. CoinDesk reported that, as of early Friday, none of the 18,270 stolen bitcoin had moved from the 19 wallets they were split into. The stolen coins were not dumped on the market during the week, at least as far as on-chain data showed.

Ether: down 2.36%

Ether opened at $2,327 and closed at $2,272, after a low of $2,170.03 on Friday. Its net weekly fall was similar to bitcoin’s, but the background was weaker. US spot ether ETFs had outflows in every session from 26 to 30 October and lost $431.4 million over the week, according to crypto.news, bringing October’s ether ETF outflows to about $1.61 billion. 24/7 Wall St put ether’s 30-day loss at about 17% as of Friday, against 7.5% for bitcoin. TRM Labs reported that the attacker had swapped about 325 million USDT for about 122,300 ETH at a discount of more than 10%, and had borrowed ether against USDT on the lending protocol Aave. For more on how ether differs from bitcoin, see Ethereum and altcoins.

Solana: down 6.76%

Solana was the weakest of the four, falling from $101.23 to $94.39, with most of the loss on Thursday. Smaller and less liquid markets tend to move further in both directions when leverage is being unwound, which is one of the concentration and liquidity risks our altcoins guide describes. CoinDesk listed 970,500 SOL among the assets taken from Binance; we have no source that links solana’s weaker week specifically to that, so we note it only as a fact.

XRP: down 3.51%

XRP opened at $1.2945 and closed at $1.2491, after a drop to $1.1975 on Friday. It fell 6.77% on Thursday alone. Binance’s XRP Ledger hot wallet was one of the first to be drained, according to TRM Labs, and CoinDesk listed 233.46 million XRP among the stolen assets. XRP was also in the first group of assets for which Binance reopened withdrawals on Sunday.

The wider market

We could not find a sourced weekly open and close for total crypto market capitalisation, so it is not in the table. For a single point in time, 24/7 Wall St and Crypto Briefing both put total market capitalisation at about $2.6 trillion on Friday, with bitcoin’s share of the total at about 59–60%.

What the Binance hack shows about custody

The hack did not break bitcoin or Ethereum. Binance said there was no evidence that any wallet’s private key had leaked, and CoinDesk reported that every transfer carried a valid signature from Binance-controlled addresses. Reuters, via NBC News, reported Binance’s account of how the attacker got in: an employee downloaded a tampered AI coding tool in June, a second engineer downloaded a malicious code repository during a fake job interview in September, and the attacker used those compromised machines and an internal AI tool to trigger the withdrawals on 29 October. In other words, the weak point was the exchange’s people and internal systems, not the blockchains.

That is the core lesson of crypto wallets and custody: when you leave coins on an exchange, you are trusting the exchange’s security and its balance sheet. In this case Binance said it would absorb the losses and that customers would not bear them. That is a choice the exchange made with its own funds. When FTX collapsed in November 2022, customers were left as creditors in a bankruptcy. Self-custody removes exchange risk but adds your own: lost seed phrases and phishing are permanent.

Why stablecoins could be frozen and bitcoin could not

One detail explains a lot about how different crypto-assets work. Of the roughly $3 billion that was immobilised, most was in USDT and USDC, according to CoinDesk. TRM Labs reported that Tether froze about 1.77 billion USDT and Circle about 825 million USDC, while CNBC later reported Circle’s USDC freeze at more than $1.1 billion. Fiat-backed stablecoins are issued by companies that can block tokens at specific addresses. Bitcoin and ether have no issuer that can do that. Our stablecoins guide explains how reserves, redemption and issuer controls work, and why a stablecoin is only as reliable as the company behind it.

Halted withdrawals are a liquidity risk

For about two days, Binance customers could not move coins off the exchange. If you needed to sell on another venue, meet a margin call elsewhere, or simply wanted your assets back, you could not. A withdrawal freeze is a risk that does not appear on any price chart. Before using any platform, check whether it is authorised (in the EU, as a crypto-asset service provider under MiCA) and what it says about how client assets are held. Our guide to crypto scams and regulation explains how to check.

A practical warning: large hacks reliably attract scammers. Fake "recovery" services and impersonators claiming to process refunds tend to appear after incidents like this. Binance’s own channels are the only place to check what it says about compensation.

Leverage and liquidations: a worked example

The liquidation numbers this week, roughly $1.5 billion in 24 hours with nearly nine in ten being longs, describe what happens when many traders hold leveraged positions in the same direction. As prices fall, positions hit their liquidation levels and are closed by force; each forced sale pushes the price lower and triggers the next. Our guide to crypto volatility and risk explains the mechanism in more detail.

EU retail clients trading crypto CFDs are limited to 2:1 leverage under ESMA rules, and in the UK the FCA has banned the sale of crypto derivatives to retail clients since January 2021. Even at 2:1, a week like this one is painful. See ESMA leverage limits and negative balance protection.

Example, with illustrative numbers based on this week’s Coinbase prices: a trader with a $5,000 account buys a bitcoin CFD position of 0.1 BTC at Wednesday’s close of $81,249. The notional value is about $8,125, so at 2:1 the margin required is about $4,062, more than 80% of the account. By Thursday’s close of $77,780, the position is down about $347. At Friday’s low of $76,141, it is down about $511, which is roughly 10% of the account and 12.6% of the margin posted, on a move of 6.3% in bitcoin. A trader using offshore leverage of 20:1 on the same account size could have held ten times that position, and the same move would have cost about $5,100, more than the whole account. Real CFD pricing also adds spreads and overnight financing; see crypto CFDs vs buying crypto.

The better approach is to size from the stop, not from the leverage available. If the trader above decided to risk 1% of the account, $50, with a stop $2,000 below entry, the position would be 0.025 BTC. The crypto position size calculator does this sum, and the crypto margin calculator shows the margin at 2:1. A stop is not a guarantee: in a fast market it can be filled well below its level. See gap risk and weekend risk.

Macro and crypto: not a hedge this week

Some investors describe bitcoin as a hedge against stress in traditional markets. This week did not support that view. Crypto fell on Thursday alongside weak tech shares, before the hack, and fell further on Friday as the Nasdaq dropped 2.86%. Gold also fell on Friday, which the forex recap attributes partly to margin-call selling. When leveraged investors need cash, they tend to sell whatever is liquid, and on days like that, assets that usually move separately can fall together. Our guide on central banks and interest rates explains why a hawkish Fed tends to weigh on riskier assets.

Risk notes

You can lose all of the money you put into crypto-assets. Prices can move by several per cent in hours, and markets trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Most retail CFD accounts lose money; brokers typically disclose between 61% and 89%. See why most retail CFD traders lose.
Exchange risk is separate from price risk. A platform can halt withdrawals even if the coins themselves are fine.
Liquidation cascades can push prices well beyond what news alone would explain, and they can reverse just as quickly. That makes them hard to trade and easy to lose money on.
If you use leverage, read about leverage and what a margin close-out means before you open a position.

What this week teaches

Custody is a risk in its own right. The Binance hack did not touch the blockchains; it went through an exchange’s staff and internal systems. Coins held on any platform depend on that platform’s security.
Not all crypto-assets can be frozen. Stablecoin issuers froze billions of tokens; nobody could freeze the stolen bitcoin.
Leverage turns a bad day into a cascade. About $1.5 billion of positions were liquidated in 24 hours, mostly longs, and the selling started before the hack was public.
Weekly figures can hide intraday damage. Bitcoin was down only 2.28% on the week, but anyone leveraged at Wednesday’s high faced a 7% fall within about 36 hours.
ETF flows can turn quickly. Four days of bitcoin ETF inflows were wiped out in one session.

Scheduled next week

These are scheduled events for Monday 2 to Sunday 8 November. This is a list, not a view on how prices will react.

Monday 2 November: the first full week of Binance’s phased withdrawal reopening; Binance has said further networks will reopen as each passes its security checks.
Tuesday 3 November: US midterm elections; US JOLTS job openings for September.
Wednesday 4 November: US international trade in goods and services.
Thursday 5 November: US preliminary third-quarter productivity and costs.
Friday 6 November: US employment report for October.

Sources

Not investment advice. This is general information and education, written without knowledge of your circumstances. It is not a recommendation to buy or sell any instrument. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Trading leveraged products carries a high risk of losing money. Risk warning

Crypto week in review 44/2026: a record Binance hack and a $1.5 billion liquidation wave