The Weekly Wrap: Binance Hacked for $6.3B & Hyperliquid News

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This Week’s Top Stories

“Binance was hacked for $6.3B in an exploit which likely involved a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop.” – Thursday, 30 October 2026 

• On Thursday evening our time, reports started spreading on X that there was an ongoing hack on Binance, as more than $2B in assets were moved from a Binance hot wallet to an unknown wallet which was funded by an address linked to Tornado Cash.
• Hours after the hack, Binance said its initial investigation suggests the security incident may have involved a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop, allowing the attacker to access a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. The exchange said it had found no evidence that any wallet private keys were leaked.
• According to analysis by blockchain security firm Blockaid, the attacker used Ethereum’s EIP-7702 authorization mechanism to attack Binance’s Binance 14 hot wallet. Because the attacker could not determine the hot wallet’s live nonce, and EIP-7702 authorizations must match the account’s nonce at the time of transaction execution, the attacker submitted 50 authorizations with different nonces in a single Type-4 transaction. Only one matched successfully, allowing the malicious delegation to take effect.
• Binance co-founder Yi He stated that user funds are safe. Binance will cover all hacking losses. Deposits and withdrawals were temporarily suspended.
• On Friday morning, Binance CEO Richard Teng communicated on X that withdrawals remain temporarily suspended while it completes a security revamp of the withdrawal service and its related addresses.
• Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the company had frozen over 1.567B USDT linked to the potential hack, while Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said Circle had frozen more than 800M USDC associated with the incident in coordination with law enforcement.
• The Arbitrum Security Council announced that it has taken emergency action to rescue 74.5M ARB and 8’425 ETH held in an address on Arbitrum One identified as connected to the Binance exploit.
• Onchain investigator ZachXBT posted that stolen funds from the $6.3B Binance exploit and the $388M Bitget exploit arrived via THORChain and were commingled at the same address. ZachXBT stated that this indicates the same actor is likely behind both incidents.

“The Fed held the federal funds rate target range unchanged at 3.75-4%.” – Wednesday, 28 October 2026 

• In the Fed’s FOMC statement, the members argue that economic activity continues to expand at a strong pace, while the geopolitical uncertainty remains elevated as well.
• The Fed also mentioned that it sees strong productivity growth, while the unemployment rate has changed little.
• In terms of inflation, the committee highlighted that inflation remains elevated and that the FOMC will continue to accumulate more data and information in order to determine the necessary policy stance to ensure a timely return to the 2% goal.
• According to the FedWatch Tool, the market currently assigns an almost 80% probability to a rate hike at the next FOMC meeting in December, slightly down from Wednesday. The probability of a pause is 20%.
• The US continues to be in a tricky situation when it comes to inflation and how higher rates would actually address the inflation that remains. It is unclear whether a hike would meaningfully affect inflationary pressure across energy, insurance, healthcare and education. It remains to be seen how the Fed will manage this situation in the coming weeks and months.

“ICE, owner of the NYSE, plans market for Hyperliquid Perps in the US.” – Thursday, 29 October 2026 

• ICE and Trade.xyz entered a partnership to launch a new market for trading perpetual futures contracts, with its own clearing, know-your-customer, and anti-money laundering systems. The market will be built on Hyperliquid’s rails and use Trade.xyz products tied to the prices of equities and other assets, pending regulatory approval.
• This partnership is likely among the most important partnerships in blockchain history, as ICE is the second-largest exchange operator in the world, running 13 regulated exchanges and 6 clearinghouses across commodities, FX, rates, and equities.
• To put this partnership into perspective, the NYSE averaged $202.5B in daily equity volume in January, 45 times as much as Trade.xyz’s $4.5B in 24H perps volume.
• This partnership could offer Hyperliquid perps to all of ICE’s participating brokers, including giants like Schwab and Interactive Brokers.

“Kraken Parent Company becomes the first CFTC-regulated Hip-3* deployer, bringing Hyperliquid to the US.” – Monday, 26 October 2026 

• The news surrounding Kraken and Hyperliquid was already known, as Kraken’s parent company, Payward, had announced plans to bring Hyperliquid to the US in September.
• This week, however, the companies and Hyperliquid communicated official plans and information on how this would actually be made possible, including how HIP-3 will support optional deployer configuration for permissioned markets in a future network upgrade. This set of additional deployer functionality is collectively called HIP-3*. At its core, HIP-3* activation involves an onchain allowlist managed by the deployer or its sub-deployers.
• Hyperliquid is a neutral infrastructure layer with the goal of supporting large parts of the financial system. HIP-3* gives deployers additional functionality to operate deployments consistent with the requirements applicable to them. As with HIP-3, HIP-3* deployers are independent operators who use Hyperliquid as the onchain infrastructure layer for their own markets.

Crypto trades lower amid the Binance hack 

Bitcoin is trading at $78K at the time of writing, down almost 10% from Wednesday’s high just below $85K amid the Binance hack on Thursday night. The whole crypto market was dragged to the downside because of this extraordinary event. 

There are very few exceptions in the altcoin world. One example is Hyperliquid, which is up on the ICE news and trading back above $90 at the time of writing. 

Interestingly, the US stock market also started trading to the downside on Thursday evening after some US tech companies missed market estimates in their earnings reports. Hawkish comments from the Bank of Japan added to the pressure after the central bank essentially declared victory in its anti-deflationary efforts, opening the door to more interest rate hikes. 

Intel Corporation slumped nearly 23% after-hours as a strong third-quarter profit was vastly outweighed by disappointing forecasts for the fourth quarter. Intel’s Q3 revenue also missed estimates.

Which DeFi tokens capture their business? 

Over the past two years, particularly since the launch of Hyperliquid’s HYPE token at the end of 2024, the whole crypto industry has been reshaped, prompting a new way of thinking about token value accrual mechanisms and how protocols can return some of their revenue to their token holders. The chart below lists various DeFi projects. Business strength (y-axis) is based on 90d annualized fees and revenue, and token value accrual (x-axis) is based on whether every voted, committed, or paused buyback program ran at its maximum approved rate. 

Hyperliquid stands out as a large business, with almost 100% of its revenue accruing back to token holders. In terms of token value accrual, Lighter, Aerodrome, Sky, and Uniswap follow Hyperliquid among the larger businesses. Chainlink, Aave, and Jupiter are some of the other well-known projects with relatively high token value accrual mechanisms, while Kamino and Morpho are among the projects with low value accrual for token holders, at least among the projects selected for the chart.

Pump.Fun launched Hyperliquid perps & DTCC Tokenization Service is live

This week, Pump.Fun announced that perps are now live on the platform through the builders code mechanism, allowing it to offer 300+ perpetual futures markets to users directly from their USDC balance in the app.

Also in the Hyperliquid world, there were many announcements regarding the upcoming launch of Elysium, the Hyperliquid L2, which the Kinetiq team will launch on November 9. Uniswap, Fomo, and Pump.Fun all announced that they will be live on Elysium on launch day, giving the L2 quite a bit of distribution to users across different applications from day one.

This week, the Depository Trust Company (DTC), a subsidiary of The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), announced the launch of the DTCC Tokenization Service (DTS). Although the launch in October this year had been widely announced in advance, this still marks a milestone in the history of tokenization, as one of the largest financial market infrastructure providers worldwide takes this step into the world of digital assets. The service initially supports 34 securities, including selected large-cap Russell 1000 constituents, ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries. Tokens are backed 1:1 by underlying securities held in custody by the Depository Trust Company (DTC), carry the same legal and ownership rights, and support round-the-clock onchain transfers between DTC-registered wallets. The service initially supports Canton Network and DTCC’s Besu-based private network, with Stellar and Circle’s Arc expected to join in 2027.

Strategy did not buy BTC last week 

Strategy communicated that it made no Bitcoin purchases last week while spending about $205M to repurchase 2M STRC preferred shares. BitMine, on the other hand, bought another 10K Ether last week, bringing its total holdings to roughly 4.95% of Ethereum’s supply and inching yet again closer to the magic 5% mark. 

Last week, the Bitcoin spot ETFs finished the week with net inflows of roughly $500M, while the Ethereum products saw net outflows of $200M. Solana and Hyperliquid did not manage to attract money either, with both recording small outflows overall last week. Zcash, on the other hand, was slightly in the positive, with net inflows of around $50M. 

This week, Bitcoin is on a streak of net inflows, while Ethereum’s net outflows continue. It remains to be seen how the flows develop today following last night’s decline in the US stock market and the Binance hack. While the hack on Binance might convince some holders to move their assets into ETFs, it might also discourage others and convince them to leave the space altogether.

Fearful markets across the board 

Both the crypto and US stock markets are in fearful territory, while members of the American Association of Individual Investors continue to lean bearish on the stock market over the next six months (41.4%). 

The Binance hack last night led to a large drop in sentiment among crypto market participants, as the Fear and Greed Index was at neutral levels this week before the incident.

• Robinhood Chain brings in $26 million as crypto revenue rises 20% in Q3. – Link 
• Zcash co-founder proposes ending grants subsidy, citing $125M treasury. – Link

Binance hack aftermath & Midterms next week 

It remains to be seen how the crypto market develops over the coming days after the Binance hack. There will surely be more information coming out with more details of the incident, but as of today, according to Binance’s official communication, user funds will be covered by the exchange. The impact of such a large hack on the whole industry is significant, particularly when considering the Bybit hack, which was the largest in history prior to yesterday, when $1.5B was stolen. At $6.3B, the loss is significantly larger, but Binance appears to be in a position to cover it, at least according to its communication to date. Market participants are surely wondering what would happen if something like this happened again in the future. At some point, such exchanges may no longer have the funds to cover losses, and the impact would be even more devastating.  

Time will tell, and the focus will now also shift to the Midterms, which are coming up on Tuesday, November 3rd. The good thing is that once they are over, some uncertainty will be gone, and market participants can then focus on something else, such as the upcoming December FOMC meeting. 

Below, you can find some of the key data releases and events to watch out for next week. 

Tuesday, 3 November 2026 

USA – Midterm Elections 

Switzerland – CPI 

Wednesday, 4 November 2026 

Eurozone – CPI, Core CPI 

Brazil – Interest Rate Decision 

Thursday, 5 November 2026 

Switzerland – Unemployment Rate 

Eurozone – PPI 

USA – Initial Jobless Claims 

Friday, 6 November 2026 

Eurozone – Retail Sales