Seeing $6.34 billion flow out of Binance, many people’s first reaction was to fear a hacker dump. But honestly, after looking at the on-chain flows, the reality is a little different from what you might expect.
Excluding the $2.85 billion in stablecoins that have already been frozen, the hackers are mainly holding 18,200 BTC and 540,000 $ETH . Since all the addresses have been blacklisted, any USDT they convert to will be frozen instantly. They can’t just dump it all at once; they can only slowly launder it over a year or two. These coins have effectively been “locked up” by other means.
What’s more interesting is that Binance has had to buy back real coins on the market and through OTC desks in recent days to replenish its reserves and lock them in its vaults. Although some smaller coins were indeed sold off in the short term as the hackers converted them to ETH, from another perspective, the circulating supply of major coins out in the market has actually shrunk.
It feels like the market has already absorbed the impact of this hack and the midterm election headwinds, so there’s no need to panic too much.
Excluding the $2.85 billion in stablecoins that have already been frozen, the hackers are mainly holding 18,200 BTC and 540,000 $ETH . Since all the addresses have been blacklisted, any USDT they convert to will be frozen instantly. They can’t just dump it all at once; they can only slowly launder it over a year or two. These coins have effectively been “locked up” by other means.
What’s more interesting is that Binance has had to buy back real coins on the market and through OTC desks in recent days to replenish its reserves and lock them in its vaults. Although some smaller coins were indeed sold off in the short term as the hackers converted them to ETH, from another perspective, the circulating supply of major coins out in the market has actually shrunk.
It feels like the market has already absorbed the impact of this hack and the midterm election headwinds, so there’s no need to panic too much.