Bitcoin's resilience after the Binance $6.5B hack, and the crypto outlook heading into US midterms
Rob from Digital Asset News covers the Binance hack, historical hack comparisons, midterm election volatility, and live Q&A.
Summary
Rob from Digital Asset News opens with Bitcoin's surprisingly resilient price action following the roughly $6.5 billion Binance hack, noting a drop of only around 5% — far less than many expected. He compares this event to the top five largest crypto hacks in history and to the FTX collapse, arguing that Bitcoin's response has been consistent with historical patterns. He notes that the FTX situation involved the misappropriation of roughly 70% of customer deposits into Alameda Research, a key difference from the Binance hack, which affected only about 5% of Binance's alleged $129 billion in total customer assets.
He then turns to the upcoming US midterm elections, citing Tom Lee's CNBC appearance — in which Tom Lee argued that institutional investors lack conviction ahead of the vote — as support for Rob's own view that risk appetite is suppressed until after the midterms. Rob adds his own observation, separate from Tom Lee, that Bitcoin has historically declined after midterm elections before recovering, and that this pattern creates a potential buying window. He states his intention to buy as heavily as possible the following week.
Rob then showcases his 'Dan Teaches Crypto' price prediction tracker website, a free tool he built to hold public forecasters accountable by archiving and tracking their predictions. He uses it to critique Tom Lee's $200,000–$250,000 Bitcoin price target and celebrates a community member, Echoli, for posting one of the most accurate predictions.
He closes with a look at Bitcoin ETF flows (negative for the week), Ethereum and Solana underperformance in ETF flows, and Zcash's roughly two straight weeks of positive flows, before opening the floor to a live Q&A with his audience.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Bitcoin's Resilience After the Binance Hack
Rob: Bitcoin never ceases to amaze me, and it looks like there is a lot more resilience than I gave Bitcoin credit for. Today we're going to take a look at what happened after the roughly $6.5 billion hack from Binance, also take a look at what's going on with the midterms, and remember there's going to be a lot of volatility around this time — which takes place next Tuesday here in the States — and why this could be a pretty big opportunity.
Tom Lee on Midterm Uncertainty
Real quick, everybody's favorite bull, Tom Lee, was on CNBC and he did make a good point. I try not to play too many of Tom Lee's clips because he's pretty much a perma-bull, which is a good way to look at things. He's an optimist — good for that, that's great. But sometimes you have to have a dose of reality. And this one, Tom actually gives a dose of reality. I have to tell you, I agree with what he's talking about here.
Tom Lee: Reality is our institutional investors just don't have conviction after the midterm. So I think between now and November 3rd, it doesn't take a lot for stocks to fall a lot, because I just don't know if there's as much dip-buying conviction until after November 3rd.
CNBC Host: Well, that's only two and a quarter trading days from now. You've got the rest of today, Monday, and Tuesday. Tom, you think people — maybe some retail traders — are sitting this one out until they know how things are going to shake out?
Tom Lee: Yes, because I think there's a lot of doomsaying about the midterms. There are people saying that if the Senate becomes Republican, this is going to be forever lost to Republicans. I think because people are putting such high stakes into this, a lot of people are hesitant to say, "I want to buy this dip at this moment." I think people are going to plan to buy the dip.
Rob: Of course they're going to plan to buy the dip. I agree with Tom. I think people are a little bit hesitant, especially with what's going on globally. We've got a war involving Iran, rising prices, increasing inflation, economic uncertainty, and this AI bubble all around us. It's just doom and gloom, and that's pretty much how it goes.
Tom is right here, except for one part where he said if the Senate goes Republican — it's already in Republican control. The big question is whether it will fall. If we take a look over at Polymarket — which party will win the Senate in 2026 — Polymarket isn't right all the time. The most recent miss was Brazil's presidential election, but I think that was kind of rigged. Just putting it out there.
We can see that since August it was essentially all Republican for quite some time, all the way through last November, January, and then coming into March and April we started to see a little bit of disillusion as people started to realize — and I think this all came around with Iran — and now, as of today, it's a total inversion. It looks like which party will win the Senate in 2026 is no longer the Republican Party. They're falling like a stone: 29% versus 72%. Can this hold? We'll see pretty soon.
Midterms and the Bitcoin Buying Window
This isn't a political channel, but I will just say that when the midterms come and pass, it's best for everybody. As a reminder, for the last four cycles, Bitcoin always goes down after the midterm elections. We talked about this two days ago. That could be 70 days, that could be 48 days, that could be 17 days — but usually it falls. However, as time has gone on, the amount of time it has taken to fall to its absolute low for the cycle has decreased. So just keep your eye on it.
I've got to tell you, next week I'm going to be buying, and I'm going to be buying as heavy as I possibly can. Let me know what you think about that in the comments section. Resilience is here, and I thought we would see much more of a drop, and we did not.
We went from a nice fat $81,000 on our way to $82K on October 29th, and fell like a stone after the hack news. We can see over here — 76, 77 — down at $76. I think the low was roughly $76, not quite $75 but pretty close. As of right now, let's refresh. Yeah, roughly the same. Over seven days we're down 3% — not too bad. But over 24 hours we're actually up and climbing back toward $78K.
Top Five Crypto Hacks of All Time — Compared
That got me thinking: this was the worst hack as far as the amount of money goes. But how does that look against the top five hacks of all time?
Here's what we've got. There was one on January 26, 2018 — Coincheck. If you remember this one, give me a little refresher in the comments. There was a $534 million hack. Look at these Bitcoin prices. Bitcoin the day before was $11,260. Twenty-four hours after the hack: $11,440. Nothing really happened. That was the fifth largest hack of all time.
What about the fourth one? That was a BNB-related incident. Look at that — Binance involved again. I don't want to get sued by anybody, but it seems like Binance has their hands on a lot of different issues that come up. Remember October 6th to October 10th in 2025 — we had an all-time high of around $126K, then within four days we dropped massively because of an error with the system itself that liquidated people like crazy, and then all of a sudden the bull run was gone. I'm not going to place blame. I'm just saying that was Binance.
Here we have the BNB bridge hack on October 6, 2022 — $570 million was lost. However, Bitcoin did pretty well, only dropping around 2–3%. Not too much at all.
Poly Network — I remember this one. 2021, $611 million loss. You'd think it would affect things, but no. $46K to $45.5K — a mild dip.
Ronin Network — remember this one? $624 million. That was in 2022 when everything was going down the tubes anyway, so not too bad. Bitcoin before was $42,000 and 24 hours after it went to $43,000 — it actually went up. That was the third largest hack.
Then the second largest hack — which was the number one hack as of three days ago, now belonging to Binance — was the Bybit hack. That was a social engineering incident at the exchange level, and they lost $1.5 billion. That was February 21st, 2025. Bitcoin before was $98,032. Twenty-four hours after: $96,600. A small dip, percentage-wise pretty hefty. But people who are in crypto understand: was the protocol hacked? No. Was there a double spend? No. Were the Satoshi wallets moved? No. This was a human error. So that's pretty much what happened there.
People who are in this space — and it's a good thing we're in a bear market — understand these things happen. It's a pretty big event, but not big enough to break resilience.
The Binance Hack vs. FTX
Now we come to the Binance hack. It's resilient, but it was sizable. We just took a look at all those previous hacks. Bitcoin went from $81,300 to $77,400. You know what that change was? Almost 5%. So it is still resilient, but it did drop quite a bit.
People say, "But Rob, what about 48 hours out?" It's the same thing. Forty-eight hours after the top five hacks, it's either down 2% or up 4–5%. With this one we're down 4%. It's the same pattern. Bitcoin remains resilient.
But the one thing I have to address is the question I kept getting: "That's a lot of money — $6.5 billion. Wasn't that roughly the same as FTX?" Roughly, yes. I think FTX was around $8.9 billion. Let's take a look. Yeah — the FTX collapse was $9 billion. That was in 2022 and it marked roughly the bottom. Now, this wasn't a hack. This was essentially a small Ponzi. People say, "It's not really a Ponzi, Rob, because all they did was take user funds and go leverage trade at Alameda Research." Okay, you got me on that one. But they still did a misappropriation of funds. They used all of the users' funds, and they were such awful traders that they lost a ton — which I don't understand, because Sam Bankman-Fried, if he had held on to a couple of his investments, one of them being Anthropic, he'd be a trillionaire. It just goes to show you that if you want to trade on leverage, you can have at it, but sometimes it's just about sticking around for the long haul.
For the FTX collapse, you had $9 billion missing. They only had $12 billion in customer deposits and 70% went into Alameda Research. So 70% of customer deposits were gone.
How many deposits does Binance have? A boatload more. The Binance hack was $6.3 billion, and roughly that is only 5% of the $129 billion in customer assets they allegedly hold. Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that Binance is the most transparent exchange that looks out for all their customers as much as possible — you can make that case, I suppose, but as far as transparency, we'll see how this all plays out. Right now they're saying your funds are SAFU and you have nothing to worry about, and they have a massive reserve of roughly $128 billion. So we'll see.
NASDAQ, Tokenized Equities, and Kraken
Let me know what you think about it in the comments. And then lastly, before we get into Q&A — watch what they do, not what they say.
This is from Ellen Tourett — definitely a good follow, always has good information. This was a NASDAQ scoop, originally from Jacqueline Malink. She says: "Breaking — a NASDAQ-listed company exec told me that their rep reached out suggesting they object to tokenized trading." So a NASDAQ-listed company exec reached out to others and said, "Hey, you probably shouldn't do any of this tokenized assets stuff — it's going to be a big problem." And some companies are saying no. So far, 38 companies have objected, and 23 are NASDAQ-listed. NASDAQ has publicly said it has concerns about tokenized shares trading outside the traditional market structure and has said it's not planning to launch a tokenized securities vehicle.
I find that very interesting, because NASDAQ Ventures agreed to invest $100 million into Payward. You know what Payward is? It's Kraken's parent company. Kraken — one of my favorite exchanges. It is interesting that they're like, "Well, let's just do an agreement — here's $100 million." It valued Payward at approximately $21 billion. The companies are advancing the NASDAQ equity token framework and collaborating to distribute tokenized stocks, aiming for a targeted launch in 2027, which means 24/7 trading and on-chain settlement. The initiative seeks to move stock settlement and trading onto continuous, always-on blockchain rails while preserving shareholder and governance rights. Quite interesting how that all works out — but not surprising.
Live Q&A
Rob: Alright, let's get into the best part of the show — Q&A. What are everybody's questions?
Frosty Peace says: "My Tylenol bottle remains resilient." Same as my ibuprofen bottle, which I need a lot more of these days as time goes on.
Algorand to the moon — sure, sure.
The cable guy arrives at Rob's stream. Look, the cable guy showed up on a Saturday in Puerto Rico. That's pretty amazing.
Gas says: "At some point Binance will have to buy back whatever tokens they were drained." Yeah, it's true. But thankfully they have Paolo Ardoino — Tether's founder — on speed dial, and Jeremy Allaire over at Circle and USDC, and they just pick up the phone and go, "Hey, we just had a hack. Could you freeze all those assets?" And they're like, "Well, guys, we're supposed to be decentralized." Yeah, yeah, we don't care about that right now — freeze all those assets and we'll worry about the other stuff later. And that's what happened. I know some people say — personally, if it's my money, freeze it all day long. But of course there are the maximalists who say, "No, that's not what decentralized means. I'd rather just lose my entire life savings." Sure you will.
Lonely Wolf is right — I believe this is the 18th anniversary year of the Bitcoin white paper. If you've never read it, in Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper for Bitcoin, nowhere does it say anything about a store of value or a hedge against inflation. It is written for peer-to-peer transactions. I have no problems with that, and I have no problems with keeping it as a store of value either. It's a pretty good bet — like digital gold. But I'm going to use it.
"Binance hack is an inside job, possibly." I have no proof of that, so I can't say it. I don't want to be sued. But where there's smoke, there's fire.
I'm looking at some of the comments — thank you to the admins for shutting down some people who are a little too spicy. Look, everybody, at the end of the day, it's all going to be just fine. Every time I think there's a massive disaster coming and things get wiped out, it usually never works out that way. As we pull ourselves away from the screens, things start to look a lot brighter. So don't worry too much — it'll be just fine.
Dan Teaches Crypto — Price Prediction Tracker
Hey everybody, Echoli is here. You know why Echoli is a celebrity? Let me show you. There is this website called Dan Teaches Crypto, and it is 100% free. If you go over to Tools and then Price Profits, this is a good one. I created this website because I was so tired of people spouting off the most ridiculous price predictions and always being wrong, with no one ever holding them accountable. So on the website, I built this with the help of Claude, and all the things that people talk about — we track it and we save the receipts using a time machine, meaning we archive all the things these people post and say, "This is you."
This is why I don't put much stock in Tom Lee — his prediction is Bitcoin will be between $200,000 and $250,000 by end of year 2026. He only needs 190% to be correct. It could happen. Just saying.
Arthur Hayes: $125K by December — might have happened. Sander Charter: $100K end of year — that seems reasonable. Tim Draper is always saying $250K. Raoul Pal — not even remotely correct.
But if you take a look at the section where you can submit your own prediction, you can put in what you think it's going to be and I'll give you a call-out if you get it right. So far today — it's October 31st, Halloween — there are 13 people who are pretty close. Dino Dinosaur is at $75K for December. Domer: $100K November. And there's Echoli: $69K October 2026. That's probably the closest you're going to get. Congratulations to Echoli for being one of the few people who got a price prediction call correct. I always like to do that because I like to see the pros versus the Joes. And usually the Joes — the average person, the plebs like us — are the ones who nail it. Congratulations, Echoli. You deserve it.
Bitcoin ETF Flows
Rob, I'm curious if we can check what the flows were for the Bitcoin ETFs. Sure. Let's take a look at all of them.
As of yesterday, it was -$643 million. Talk about resilience — Bitcoin absorbed that pretty well. Down 4.8%, but not too bad. Then look at the week before, October 22nd — it was -$635 million. So, whatever.
Let's take a look at Ethereum. Ethereum has just been sucking wind for quite some time. The whole week was rough. On Monday, $88 million out. $60 million out Tuesday. $21 million out Wednesday. $105 million out Thursday. And then Friday, $155 million out. I know Wall Street seems to want Ethereum, but as far as price action, not the greatest.
What about Solana? Wow, that one sucked too. $8 million Monday, $20 million Tuesday, $5 million Wednesday, $27 million Thursday, only $10 million on Friday.
Hyperliquid — nothing really moving. About $3.7 million.
And then Zcash. Congratulations to all the VCs who are pumping that product. $14.8 million — all positive. Roughly two weeks straight of positive flows. Pretty good, Zcash. Pretty good. I say it because I'm bitter — I never got into it. At least I'm honest.
We're all going to make it — that's very true, Hector.
Echoli for president of Puerto Rico — yeah, that's right. Maybe you can help us. Maybe you can take over the position over at LUMA. Looks like it might be looking for a new CEO.
And Rusty reminds us — good point, Rusty — ho ho ho, who is ready for a Santa rally in December? Looks pretty good.