Bitcoin Traders Accuse Binance Of Hunting Its Own Customers To Cover Hack Losses

Bitcoin has logged five straight weeks of billion-dollar liquidation days, and a theory gaining traction across crypto Twitter says the world's largest exchange has a hand in it. The claim, laid out on Simply Bitcoin Live, is that Binance is pushing price into leverage clusters to help cover the losses from its record $6.3 billion hack.

THE HACK BEHIND THE THEORY

On October 29, hackers stole roughly $6.3 billion from Binance in what blockchain analysis firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis have called the largest crypto heist on record, with both firms pointing to North Korea's TraderTraitor hacking unit.

Binance pledged to cover all customer losses and tapped its Secure Asset Fund for Users, its futures insurance fund, and its own corporate treasury to do it. Roughly $3 billion of the stolen assets were frozen on-chain with help from Tether, Circle, and Ripple. Binance has since said it replenished the vast majority of the affected funds and resumed withdrawals in phases starting November 1.

THE PATTERN TRADERS ARE POINTING TO

Several accounts followed closely on the show, including Cento Trades, Crypto Soul Hunter, and Coup Capital LLC, have been mapping a repeating sequence since the hack: price gets pushed into clusters of leveraged long positions, those longs get wiped, spot buyers quietly absorb the dip, and the cycle resets. One account cited on the show put it as four separate flush events in thirteen days, with the majority of Binance accounts still positioned long heading into each one.

The host also cited a tweet from an account called Bishacks pointing out that the last five weeks have produced more than $1 billion in liquidations on multiple separate days, something that historically has only clustered this tightly during the depths of a bear market. The host was careful to frame the Binance theory as speculation rather than confirmed fact, noting that pinning an exact culprit on any single liquidation cascade is inherently difficult.

CZ AS A COUNTER-INDICATOR

Part of the case rests on an informal pattern the host has tracked around Binance founder Changpeng Zhao's social media activity: a bullish post from Zhao, the host argued, has preceded local price tops on several occasions this year, including a bullish post in late September that was followed by a slide back toward the 200-day moving average. The host described this as his own anecdotal read rather than a documented correlation, and offered it as something to watch rather than a settled fact.

WHAT A REVERSAL WOULD LOOK LIKE

The other half of the setup is the short side. A post from an account called Max Crypto, cited on the show, put short liquidations at risk near $8.28 billion if Bitcoin rallies about 10% from current levels, a move that would take price back toward the $83,000 area. Bitcoin traded near $74,390 during the broadcast, down about 41% from its all-time high.

A separate update from Cento Trades, also cited on air, showed Binance's taker buy and sell volume on its Bitcoin perpetual market nearly split down the middle, with sellers ahead by only a slim margin on almost $11 billion of volume. The read offered on the show was that when the side doing the selling goes flat, the pressure that has been holding price down has less room to keep working.

None of this confirms Binance is deliberately engineering the liquidations. What is confirmed is the scale of the short interest sitting below the market and the unusual stretch of back-to-back red weeks that got it there. A move back toward $83,000 would not need much to unwind a meaningful chunk of it.

This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.