The hacker who withdrew about $3 billion from Binance sold off seven altcoins and moved into Ethereum. He sold tokens worth $158.25 million and used all the proceeds to buy 70,480 ETH.
About $2.86 billion remains under his control, and issuers managed to freeze another roughly $2.69 billion. A freeze is a block on tokens at a specific address. Only the issuing company can press that button, and Bitcoin and Ethereum have no such button.
This directly affects traders. Sales of this size went through the open market and hit altcoin quotes.
What exactly was sold?
The breakdown was provided by the Lookonchain service. This is a service for tracking wallets on the blockchain.
- UNI - 7.02 million tokens at $5.65 for $39.63 million
- ENA - 217.5 million at $0.16 for $33.93 million
- PEPE - 7.77 trillion at $0.0000041 for $31.66 million
- LINK - 2.57 million at $10.14 for $26.05 million
- AAVE - 127,953 at $111.55 for $14.27 million
- ONDO - 21.85 million at $0.30 for $6.62 million
- WLD - 17.32 million at $0.35 for $6.09 million
Why ETH specifically?
The choice of ETH is no accident. You can only freeze a token that has an issuer with a blocking function.
- BTC, ETH, TRX and SOL - have no such function, and the rest of the haul is held in them
- About $23 million was left sitting in altcoins, and the teams that issued them cannot touch it either
The sales went through Uniswap and hit quotes. Uniswap is an exchange without an intermediary; trading happens from liquidity pools.
FUN crashed by 95% in its pool, and RAD and OGN were dumped through the same address. The unsold 580.8 million FUN went back to the collection wallet.
How much was frozen?
According to TRM Labs estimates, several assets were blocked at once.
- 1.77 billion USDT - from Tether
- 825 million USDC - from Circle
- 40.5 million of 88.5 million RLUSD - from Ripple
- 27.8 million USD1 - from World Liberty Financial
- 8,426 ETH and 74.6 million ARB - from the Arbitrum Security Council
In total, that is about $2.7 billion as of 03:30 Moscow time. Binance itself puts the stolen amount at about $3 billion.
What is in the wallets now?
The attacker's addresses hold 495,724 ETH (~$1.09 billion) and 18,270.2 BTC (~$1.41 billion). The money is spread across 19 wallets.
- Bitcoin has not moved since 23:48 Moscow time on the night of the theft
- The ETH position grew by about 75,000 coins during the freeze
- The average purchase price was about $2,245 per ETH: at the time of the hack it fell from $2,335 to $2,255 within an hour
Trading such markets without a capital buffer is dangerous. How prop trading works - in the academy, and you can pick a challenge for your market in the calculator.
The main point: one address crashed FUN by 95% in a single series of sales. In thin altcoins, such a move arrives within minutes, and there will be no warning.
Did you see PEPE and UNI go down?
When one address dumps $158 million worth of pools, everyone sees the move. After that, what decides is not the idea but the account size. In an account of a couple thousand dollars, such a dump in UNI or PEPE is a dinner, not a week's result. In prop trading, the trading capital is provided by the company: you pay for the selection, pass the challenge, and then work with its account under its risk limits. The scheme is worth understanding before the next wallet starts unloading.