MelangeBot OP • 2h ago Their insurance fund (SAFU) is completely wiped out, it's only $1 billion in BTC
The name of the fund was originally inspired by this meme
FWIW, at the end of every crypto bear market, a CEX usually blows up (eg FTX)...
And decreasing, since BTC is dropping as we speak. Always a good idea to hedge a currency with the currency itsself
Depends on what you’re insuring, no? For theft, it actually makes senses, right? That way, you’re insuring a constant number of coins, no matter what the market is doing. If you’re insurance currency would tank during a bitcoin heist, you would lose the insurance effect.
Binance has equity and cash flow cover this, outside the insurance fund.
They custody $150B.
FTX was larger in dollar terms and ecosystem was smaller back in a day.
If a massive heist like this triggered a run on one of the largest exchanges (Binance), potentially leading to a liquidity crisis, the consequences for the ecosystem could be far worse than temporarily freezing specific addresses holding stolen stablecoins.
Not saying that's what would have happened, but it seemed like a real possibility. And I'm not saying freezing assets is good in general, but in this particular case, maybe it was the lesser evil.
I want crypto because I don't trust nation states with the leverage and dials of fiat currency. All we've done is replace government with trusting whoever made a particular stablecoin.
Permissionless crypto is the only real crypto.
Seriously?
Oh you didn't know? I bet you trade in "dollars". That's cute.
Seems like the issue here is that he became former CEO. Funds are not safu without him...
[1] https://people.com/trump-pardons-changpeng-zhao-binance-cryp...
For another narrative, it was 83,038 a month ago on Sept 29th, so is down 5% in one month. And one year ago it was 112,562 on Oct 29th 2025 - down over 30% in one year. Well into "bear market" territory.
Using "traditional" market indicators and definitions for things like bear/bull markets doesn't feel sensible for such a volatile market.
Not making any market predictions here-- just saying that it's probably not that useful to generalize from that event.
Binance is making so much money, covering this hack is peanuts for them.
I downloaded Binance's self published market data (https://data.binance.vision/), calculated spot and futures volume for the past year, and then applied their *highest fee tier* on both sides of the volume (for every $1 traded, they generate a fee on the taker and the maker. the fee rate is asymmetrical).
Spot revenue worked out to $7.6B USD, perps revenue worked out to $13.8B
This is an upper bound on the fees charged on volume. Binance also scams their users with a b-book, has DMM deals, etc.
I don't want to get into all that today.
But the final result is that they print somewhere in the range of $20B per year on fees. I guess CZ also has huge stockpiles of BTC and stuff. A 1% rise in BTC price probably means more for them than their actual fees, LOL.
All this to say, I think $5.6B significantly hurts.
See Google's stock price today. Their ads business slowed down a bit, and their stock tanked 10%. If binance was publicly traded, I imagine a similar affect would be demonstrated on their price.
I agree. My wording was imprecise. I was trying to give an idea of the size of the company/ecosystem, using BNB’s market cap as a proxy.
As Binance doesn’t publish their financial statements, it’s difficult to get the more relevant metrics, like FCF.
I also know Binance is a privately held company that doesn’t publish financial statements. If you can tell me their P/E, go right ahead.
Not that I think P/E would have much use here. P/E is a relative valuation metric (how cheap/expensive).
The relevant metric would be something like FCF, as gizajob wrote, but again: not available.
I was trying to give an idea of the size of the company, that is all.
me: no worries boss, our market cap is $100B
boss (who is also the tooth fairy): oh right cool np