I watched the recap from master vida. I really admire it.
(I made 1,000,000 USD from the recap in the recent BROCCOLI714 hacking incident)
Prerequisites and infrastructure:
- I have long-term accumulated a position of 200,000 USD in BROCCOLI714 at a cost of 0.016, which I bought around early November this year. Both spot and futures are included. After buying, I got stuck and didn’t dare to check.
- The trading style of the dealer from October to November was to rapidly increase in a few hours and then immediately sell with a large bearish candle, so I set a reminder for my small coin positions to alert me if the increase exceeds 30% within 1800 seconds.
- I also have a long position in the Binance perpetual contract for BROCCOLI714USDT with an average opening price of around 0.015, amounting to 500,000 USDT, for arbitrage on the funding rate.
When the huge price difference between spot and futures occurred: my short-term price increase alert program and spot-futures price difference alert program were both going off crazy alarms > making me focus entirely on getting to my computer to start working.
I immediately reported this situation in the Chinese-speaking core group of my community:
- My first reaction was to quickly close my arbitrage position. Because my original arbitrage hedge position of 500,000 USDT had turned into a spot value of 800,000 USDT and a futures position of 500,000 USDT. I immediately closed all arbitrage positions to secure a profit of 300,000 USDT.
But I thought it was very unusual because historically, no smart money would violently raise the spot price regardless of the price difference. I took a look at the order book depth and was shocked to find that the bid depth of 10% on Binance spot had 5 million USDT in buy orders, while the bid depth on futures was only 50,000 USDT. Some said they suspected someone’s Binance account had been hacked, and I also thought that was quite reasonable.
- I took another look at the order book on Binance's main site and was shocked to find that BROCCOLI714, which had a market cap of 40 million at the time, had bids totaling 26 million USDT. From this, I inferred that someone’s account must have been hacked or that there was a bug in the market-making program because no smart money would act so foolishly to do charity like this. No smart money would play like this in the spot market.
After seeing that the hacker had 26 million USDT in bullets on the spot order book, I knew his goal was to explode the spot price) raise the futures) and he exited on the futures.
So I monitored the changes in Binance's order book on one screen. I knew that as long as the hacker didn’t withdraw a $20 million buy order in the spot market, the price of BROCCOLI714 would continue to rise.
At that time, my first reaction was to go long on the Binance contract, but I found that the Binance contract had already triggered the 'circuit breaker protection mechanism', which only allowed for position reduction. At that time, BROCCOLI spot was already at 0.07, while the Binance contract was controlled by the circuit breaker mechanism at 0.038, and the Bybit contract had risen to 0.055. So I chose to try going long on the Binance BROCCOLI714USDT perpetual contract once every 5-10 seconds on my trading terminal. As long as the order was successfully placed, it meant that the time of the circuit breaker mechanism had passed, and the Binance contract would explode upwards.
I successfully seized this opportunity and added a long position of about 200,000 USDT at an entry cost of 0.046 in futures.
I knew that this incident must have been caused by a hacker or a bug in the market-making program, and the short-term price increase was too high. The final outcome would definitely be a total loss. So I kept watching the order book for Binance spot.
The hacker canceled the order book once halfway, which led me to believe that he had been sanctioned by Binance’s risk control department. So I started to crazily sell all my accumulated + later increased positions in BROCCOLI714 spot and futures, starting from January 1, 2026, 04:20:52.732 China time, without considering the cost. I had an original position of 200,000 USDT + later increased another 200,000 USDT, and I managed to cash out about 1.5 million USDT. (Many of the original accumulated positions were opened in the futures market, which caused me not to capture that much premium.)
At 4:21, after being scared away by the hacker's withdrawal of buy orders, the unscrupulous hacker put the buy orders back about a minute later and directly raised the price to 0.15. But I knew he would ultimately be sanctioned by Binance's risk control department. If his account was sanctioned) bids were canceled) broccoli would collapse, but just because it was 1.1 now, the staff were relatively lazy and hadn’t sanctioned him yet.
So I kept a close eye on the order book.
Later at 4:31, I found that the hacker really had canceled all the bids.
At 4:32, everything was completely withdrawn. Moreover, this time it took a long time to re-list, and + friends in the group said it should be that someone tampered with Binance's technology, and he was likely sanctioned. So I began to short. I opened a short position of about 400,000 USDT on Binance futures, with a cost of around 0.065. The final closing price was about 0.02.
