From Decrypt · By Tyler Warner
Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our daily news show 'FOMO HOUR' covering all of the top stories and market action.
GM!
Today’s top news:
Crypto majors chop over weekend in Binance hack aftermath; BTC at $77.6k
Binance turns on withdrawals post-hack, sees $3.64B exodus
FBI and Secret Service open probes into Binance hack
BTC ETFs lose $643M in outflows on Friday, flip October to red
Nvidia and Micron added to list of companies objecting to tokenized shares on OKXICE, now at 50
BitcoinBTC · USD$77,910−3.11%Oct 26Oct 28Oct 30Oct 31Nov 2$81.8k$80.1k$78.4k$76.7k24h HighHigh$78,72824h LowLow$77,599VolVol$693.8M→Buy Bitcoin with USDTPowered by JupiterPrice data by CoinGeckoCoinGeckoMore Bitcoin news and projections →💸 The Binance Hack Just Cost Bitcoin ETFs Their Whole Month
Through Thursday, October was a quiet, slightly positive month for Bitcoin ETFs. Then North Korea took $6.4 billion out of Binance five minutes after the closing bell, and Friday’s single session erased the entire month.
To recap the Binance hack, attackers drained roughly $6.4 billion from Binance’s hot wallets across about 10 blockchains, with most of it inside 20 minutes on Thursday afternoon. That’s more than four times the old record, the $1.5 billion Bybit theft in February 2025. Both firms attribute it to TraderTraitor, the North Korea-linked group that also hit Bybit.
The entry point has changed since Friday. Binance first blamed a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer, then found “additional points of breach.” On Ethereum, the attacker used 50 pre-signed authorizations to turn a Binance hot wallet into a contract that emptied itself—a failure of Binance’s own signing approvals, not of Ethereum. No private keys leaked. The attacker wiped its tooling on the way out.
Friday was the aftermath, and it was bloody. Bitcoin ETFs bled $643.3 million on Friday, the biggest day of the month, ending a four-session buying streak. That one day took October from +$127 million to −$515.9 million. September was +$2.65 billion. The ETH ETFs were worse: −$1.61 billion for October, their worst month since launch, and an 11-session losing streak into the weekend.
Now the biggest players in the U.S. government are reacting. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig told CNBC the hack “proves our exact point.” “The real issue here is that these are unregulated offshore exchanges, and they don’t have the same sorts of safeguards.” He’s pitching a “federal option”—let offshore venues register with the CFTC and meet US cybersecurity standards. He also notes the hole came in “from someone’s laptop,” not from a blockchain. The FBI and Secret Service have also both opened probes.