🎰 Hackers broke into Binance, but the ones who made money… were Ethereum validators
A classic: the thief was in such a hurry that he robbed himself.
Imagine: you’re running late for a flight, it takes off in 10 minutes, and you’re carrying a suitcase full of cash in a foreign currency. There’s only one currency exchange booth at the airport, and the cashier can immediately tell you’re in a hurry. He quotes you a rate that makes you want to cry. You agree because your plane is about to leave.
The liquidity pool is the exchange itself: there’s not much money in the till, and you’re trying to exchange too much, too quickly. The rate gets worse with every bill. And behind you, scalpers are already lining up: they buy the favorable leftovers from the cashier and immediately resell them at a higher price. Those are arbitrage bots. While you were running to catch your plane, everyone around you was making money off your panic. The Binance hackers found themselves in exactly this situation that night, only on the blockchain.
What happened
They needed to convert the stolen funds urgently, before stablecoin issuers froze the assets. So they exchanged the coins at unfavorable prices, trying to avoid being frozen. The result: they lost about $119 million on the swaps alone.
Where the money went:
🛒 Buying ETH: ~$71.5 million in overpayment. At the time, the main Uniswap WETH/USDT pool was priced 38% higher than on Hyperliquid. It’s like paying $138 for something worth $100 just because you’re in a hurry.
💸 Selling stolen tokens: ~$24.8 million. They sold below market price.
🔁 Buying TRX: ~$22.4 million. Another overpayment for speed.
In total, the hackers managed to convert about $729 million in stolen USDT into ETH and TRX before the freeze. In other words, they paid a hefty “urgency fee.”
Who made money
First came the MEV bots—automated speculators who profit from any market jitters. They spotted the skewed prices and rushed in to arbitrage. The bots made about $60 million in profit, and they paid tips to builders to get their trades included in a block first.
Then the chain of events unfolded:
Bots tip builders (the ones who assemble blocks). Over 4.5 hours, builders received 10,251 ETH in tips.
Builders pass almost everything on to validators (the ones who propose blocks). Validators received about 11,217 ETH, while builders kept around 564 ETH.
That adds up to ~$30 million—a pretty nice bonus for one night.
Putting it in perspective
During the same 4.5 hours the previous night, tips totaled 4.6 ETH. It’s like a taxi driver getting four and a half euros in tips one night, then earning three years’ worth of salary the next.
Bonus: the network was shaking
That night, Ethereum saw 10,235 failed transactions, compared with about 3,500 the night before. Everyone was elbowing their way in, and not everyone made it through.
The takeaway
The blockchain is transparent, and panic on it is much more expensive than in everyday life. The hacker wanted to cover their tracks quickly, but ended up leaving a $119 million receipt on the blockchain. That overpayment was collected by an entire chain of players: bots, builders, and validators. 🧾
How a bug made life harder for the hackers
The well-deserved theft of the year
