coindesk.com
The crypto market is a sea of red amid renewed security concerns. Standard Chartered expects more near-term pain.
Bitcoin BTC$78,037.23 has declined more than 3% over the past 24 hours to about $77,400 on Friday morning, having briefly dropped toward $76,000 a couple of hours ago. Ether ETH$2,232.04, $BNB $BNB$716.51, $XRP ($XRP) and solana (SOL) declined by slightly more.
The sell-off hit leveraged futures traders particularly hard. Total market-wide liquidations stood at $1.5 billion at the time of writing, with long positions – bets that prices would rise – bearing most of the losses. Bitcoin accounted for $468 million in liquidations, followed by ether at $358 million.
Binance said on Thursday that a security incident had affected roughly $6.3 billion worth of crypto assets, surpassing the record $1.5 billion hack at Bybit in 2025, which was linked to North Korea.
“It does look like a hack,” Binance’s former chief executive Changpeng Zhao said on X. Zhao, widely known as CZ, no longer runs the exchange but remains a key shareholder.
In a post on X, Binance said the suspected breach may have involved a compromised engineer’s laptop, enabling unauthorized withdrawals.
Vincent Chok, founder and chief executive of First Digital, said $FDUSD stolen in the attack had been frozen.
“$FDUSD stolen in the attack has been frozen, and we’re monitoring the situation closely. We’re working alongside the Binance team and will share updates as we have them. Our priority is protecting $FDUSD holders and stopping bad actors from moving stolen funds. Protecting users is a responsibility we all share,” Chok said in an email.
Earlier on Thursday, decentralized betting platform Polymarket suspended international trading after hackers drained more than $2.6 million from user accounts.
Standard Chartered sees more downside
The back-to-back incidents at two of the industry’s best-known platforms could keep prices under pressure for some time, Standard Chartered’s Global Head of Digital Assets Research Geoffrey Kendrick said in an email.
“The news overnight about a (to be investigated) hack on Binance and associated freezing of assets has seen crypto prices, as well as the price of crypto stocks, a lot lower,” he said in an email. “I suspect the negative price action still has some way to go. Only after assets are unfrozen and more detail of the hack emerges will we find a new base.”
Kendrick said investors should eventually rotate toward decentralized exchanges, arguing that Binance’s troubles could accelerate a structural shift away from centralized platforms.
