Binance's $6.3 Billion Hack Is Crypto's Biggest Ever - Why Coinbase Fell 12.5% and Riot Dropped 8.7%

What Happened

On the night of Thursday, October 29, roughly $6.36 billion in digital assets was drained from Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. According to blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs, attackers pulled funds from Binance wallets across ten different blockchains, with the bulk of the assets moved within about 20 minutes. The industry is calling it the largest single hack in crypto's history - more than four times the size of the $1.5 billion Bybit hack from February 2025, which had itself set the previous record.

Binance froze deposits and withdrawals the moment the breach became apparent. Stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle moved quickly, freezing more than $2.3 billion between them, and roughly $3 billion of the stolen assets have now been locked on-chain in total. The whereabouts of the remaining roughly $3.3 billion is still unknown. Binance said it would cover all hacking-related losses out of its own balance sheet, and on Sunday, November 1 - three days after the breach - it resumed withdrawals, saying it had restored coverage for 90% of affected user assets. That 90% figure comes from Binance itself; no independent third party has verified it yet.

Late Saturday, October 31, the FBI said it had determined North Korea was behind the attack. The bureau said North Korean-linked actors laundered the stolen assets by converting them into Ethereum, a method similar to the one used in the 2025 Bybit hack, which U.S. authorities attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group. Binance has said it found no evidence that any wallet's private keys were leaked, but exactly how the attackers breached trading accounts in the first place remains unclear.

Bitcoin fell to roughly $77,300 on Thursday, a six-week low, before stabilizing near $78,000 over the weekend. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index dropped to 30, putting sentiment firmly in "Fear" territory. Elon Musk added to the unease, posting a warning on social media about further hacking risk across the crypto ecosystem.

Why U.S.-Listed Crypto Stocks Got Hit So Hard

The breach happened at an exchange that isn't even U.S.-based, yet the shockwave landed squarely on Wall Street. On Friday, October 30, Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) closed down 12.54% at $140.46, after opening premarket with a more modest 5% decline that nearly tripled in size by the closing bell. Coinbase happened to report third-quarter earnings on the very same day, and the overlap meant the stock absorbed two shocks at once - hack-driven fear and whatever the market made of its results.

Bitcoin mining stocks fell in lockstep. MARA Holdings (NASDAQ: MARA), formerly Marathon Digital, dropped 6.49% to $6.70, while Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT) slid 8.70% to $12.545. In premarket trading, other crypto-adjacent names including Galaxy Digital and CleanSpark were down roughly 5% as well, pointing to a sector-wide selloff rather than an isolated move. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), which holds a large bitcoin treasury, pared some of its intraday losses but was not spared the downward pressure either.

The mechanism behind this kind of correlated selloff is straightforward. Platforms like Coinbase and Robinhood generate a large share of their revenue from trading volume and assets under custody. News of a major exchange hack triggers a specific fear among users - "if it happened there, it could happen to the platform holding my funds" - which translates into expectations of lower trading activity and asset outflows, and that gets priced into the stock almost immediately. Mining stocks, meanwhile, trade almost as a leveraged proxy for bitcoin's own price, so a six-week low in bitcoin mechanically dragged MARA and Riot lower too. Wall Street analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald, TD Cowen and Compass Point generally argued the hack was unlikely to derail the broader crypto market structurally, but some commentary, including from Benzinga, noted the selloff compounded an already-weak "crypto winter" that had been pressuring trading volumes - and therefore earnings - at Coinbase and Robinhood well before this hack occurred.

Zoom out, and the timing matters. This hit just after the Nasdaq Composite closed out October down 5.3%, its worst monthly performance since March 2025, amid separate worries about AI data center spending and guidance shocks from Alphabet and Intel. Risk appetite across equities was already fragile, and a record-breaking crypto hack added one more reason for investors to de-risk. The episode is a reminder that crypto is no longer a fully separate asset class from equities - it increasingly functions as a barometer for how much risk investors are willing to take on across the board, and moves in one tend to bleed into the other.

What to Take Away From This

• Exchange risk is entirely separate from price risk. Regardless of what bitcoin or ethereum are "worth" at any given moment, the risk that a specific exchange loses customer assets to a hack or operational failure through custody, never goes to zero. This is exactly why self-custody - moving assets off exchanges and into a personal wallet - keeps getting recommended, however inconvenient it can be.
• Crypto-adjacent stocks tend to move more violently than the underlying coin. Bitcoin's decline to a six-week low was real but comparatively contained; Coinbase fell more than 12% and Riot nearly 9% on the same news cycle. Trading platforms and mining companies often behave like leveraged bets on crypto prices, not simple proxies.
• Overlapping news events can amplify a single stock's reaction. Coinbase's drop was compounded by reporting earnings on the same day the hack dominated headlines. When a stock moves sharply, check whether multiple catalysts landed on the same day before assuming you understand the full cause.
• How fast assets get frozen determines how much damage is contained. Tether and Circle's rapid freeze of over $2.3 billion limited the usable portion of the stolen funds. Binance's claim of "90% coverage restored" is worth watching for independent verification rather than taking at face value.
• Crypto's correlation with equities keeps strengthening. This hack landed during an already-shaky period for the Nasdaq and added to broad risk-off sentiment. Treating crypto as a diversification tool fully uncorrelated from stocks is an increasingly outdated assumption for portfolio construction.

FAQ

Did U.S. investors who held funds on Binance get hurt directly?

Binance is a global exchange that doesn't operate directly for U.S. retail users (it has a separate U.S. entity, Binance.US), so direct exposure for American investors through Binance itself is limited. The impact on U.S. markets showed up mainly through the stock-price declines in U.S.-listed crypto names like Coinbase, MARA Holdings, and Riot Platforms, not through direct account losses on the exchange itself.

How can you tell whether Coinbase's drop was caused by the hack or its earnings?

It's hard to cleanly separate the two since they landed on the same day. Premarket trading showed roughly a 5% decline driven by hack headlines alone, before the drop widened past 12% once regular trading opened and the earnings reaction layered on top. The most reasonable read is that both factors compounded each other rather than one fully explaining the move.

Is Binance's claim that 90% of stolen assets are now covered trustworthy?

That figure comes directly from Binance, with no independent audit or third-party verification confirmed as of this writing. Given that the exchange resumed withdrawals and made this claim just three days after the breach, investors should watch for whether Binance later publishes detailed, auditable evidence to back up the number.

Related reading: Bybit sues North Korea and Lazarus Group over $1.5 billion hack, Nasdaq's worst month since March 2025

Sources

This article is an original synthesis and analysis based on the reporting below, not a reproduction of the original articles. Please check the source articles directly for the most current figures.

• Binance's $6.3 billion hack: What we know and what comes next - CNBC
• Binance resumes withdrawals following $6.3 billion hack, says 90% of stolen user assets are covered - CNBC
• A simple explainer of the massive $6.3 billion crypto heist at Binance - NPR
• Crypto stocks drop after record $6.3bn Binance hack - Investing.com

⚠️ This article is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. Crypto and crypto-adjacent equity markets are highly volatile - always verify the latest data before making investment decisions.