DOGE $0.0760 +1.28%
ADA $0.1937 +0.46%
AVAX $8.84 +4.81%
LINK $11.80 +3.77%
GRAM $1.22 +3.74%
ARB $0.1645 +1.90%
NEAR $4.40 +1.64%On Sunday, a billionaire investor said on the Moonshots podcast, as Finbold reported, that Bitcoin would one day be hacked and go to zero. By Friday, a massive theft had indeed taken place, but the network that failed was not Bitcoin. It was Binance, one of the industry's biggest exchanges. The gap between those two ideas, a protocol and the companies built on top of it, framed a week that began with risk aversion and weak prices and ended with the FBI naming North Korea as the culprit.
A Quiet Run of Inflows
The week opened with an ordinary mix of progress and warning. Crypto Briefing reported that the SEC had cleared Volatility Shares' 3x Bitcoin and Ether ETFs for listing. Initia, meanwhile, halted its layer-one chain and rollups after a $2.7 million exploit tied to unauthorised token minting, as CryptoNinjas reported.
Monday brought the buyers. Bitcoin.com News reported a $305 million Bitcoin ETF comeback driven by a $676 million BlackRock inflow. CoinGape noted that a Vanguard ETF had disclosed its first purchase of Metaplanet shares, 4.5 million of them. At Token2049, Bitmine capped its Ethereum treasury at 5% of supply while chairman Tom Lee declared a new bull run, according to BitPinas.
Rates then took over. Bitcoin slipped below $80,000 on Monday ahead of the Federal Reserve's decision. On Wednesday, Cointelegraph reported ETF inflows of $176 million as Bitcoin climbed back above that line. The Fed's decision came on Wednesday, and Bitcoin traded near $80,000 into Thursday. In Canada, the central bank's governor defended a hike to 2.5%.
The week also had a darker side before the main event. Crypto News Flash reported a breach at Bithumb, months after its $40 billion Bitcoin blunder. Ripple, by contrast, kept building: it opened a 24/7 returns feature for corporate treasury clients and tapped Coinbase to widen access to its RLUSD stablecoin.
Thursday's Rumour, Friday's Confirmation
On Thursday, rumours of a Binance hack hit the market and wiped out leveraged long positions. The figures moved quickly. Changpeng Zhao said the outflows looked like a hack as $2.4 billion was frozen. The Block put suspicious outflows at up to $5.8 billion. BeInCrypto reported that Circle and Tether had stepped in with freezes.
By Friday, Binance had confirmed a hack estimated at $6.3 billion, and Bitcoin Magazine reported that Bitcoin briefly slid. TRM Labs attributed the theft to North Korea. Bloomberg reported that the stolen Bitcoin is likely gone for good.
The network that failed was not Bitcoin. It was Binance.
Counting the Damage
The weekend made the scale clearer. CryptoNinjas reported an FBI probe and roughly $3 billion in stolen funds frozen. BeInCrypto counted $643 million pulled from Bitcoin ETFs. Coinbase led a sell-off in crypto stocks. On Sunday, the FBI formally linked North Korea to the attack and asked virtual asset providers for help. Charles Hoskinson used the moment to warn about the risks of EIP-7702 code, and Michael Saylor argued that crypto security would come out stronger.
Still, Cointelegraph observed that Bitcoin held up better than expected. It closed the week at $78,229, down 2.7%, with Ether at $2,276, down 2.5%. Over the final 24 hours, Ether gained 1.12%. Overall sentiment remained gloomy.
The largest on-chain moves fit the week's mood. The biggest was $613 million in BTC leaving Binance, alongside $235 million in XRP and $95 million in SOL also moving out of the exchange. Separately, $483 million in WBTC moved from Morpho Blue to an unlabelled address, and $446 million in ETH moved between unlabelled addresses. Elsewhere, HTX left the UK after an FCA settlement and KuCoin withdrew from Russia and Belarus.
The open questions are how much of the frozen money can be recovered, and whether the FBI's appeal to exchanges turns into coordinated action.