Crypto Pulse: October 30, 2026 — Bitcoin Slides Below $77,000 After Record $6.3 Billion Binance Hack

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Bitcoin fell below $77,000 on Friday after the largest theft in crypto history, a security breach at Binance that the exchange said affected roughly $6.3 billion in assets, pulled the whole board lower for a second straight day. In Market Briefer’s delayed snapshot at 5:14 p.m. CDT, Bitcoin fell 2.51% to $76,779, Ethereum dropped 1.11% to $2,240 and Solana lost 1.70% to $95.45, a session tracked throughout the day on Market Briefer’s Crypto desk.

The board below is Market Briefer’s delayed market data, sourced from CoinGecko and delayed by about 15 minutes, as of 5:14 p.m. CDT on Friday, October 30, 2026, ordered by 24-hour move, largest gain first.

TRON took the steepest fall on the board, down 5.83% to $0.330, reversing the lone gain it posted on Thursday, when it rose while every other major coin fell. Bitcoin’s 2.51% drop to $76,779 was the next largest, followed by Solana, down 1.70% to $95.45 for a second day below $100, and Ethereum, down 1.11% to $2,240. Dogecoin limited its loss to 0.82% at $0.075, and Cardano was the board’s only gainer, up 1.38% to $0.194, leaving the day’s full range at just over seven percentage points.

The day’s story was the breach itself. 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, CoinDesk reported, and the exchange said in a post on X that the suspected breach may have involved a compromised engineer’s laptop, enabling unauthorized withdrawals. Former chief executive Changpeng Zhao said on X that “it does look like a hack.” About $3 billion of the proceeds have been frozen and withdrawals on the exchange remain paused, CoinDesk reported, and analytics firms TRM Labs and Elliptic attributed the attack to North Korea-linked hackers.

The containment effort ran through the stablecoin issuers. Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino said on X that the company had frozen more than $1.567 billion in USDT linked to the potential hack, and Circle co-founder and chief executive Jeremy Allaire said the company had frozen more than $800 million in USDC in coordination with law enforcement, CoinDesk reported, while First Digital said the FDUSD stolen in the attack had been frozen. The freezes are the practical side of how the largest dollar tokens are issued and controlled, the ground Market Briefer’s explainer on stablecoins and where their risk sits works through, and they account for most of the roughly $3 billion frozen so far.

The market damage was concentrated in leveraged positions. Liquidations in crypto futures jumped fourfold to $1.57 billion, CoinDesk reported, with Bitcoin accounting for $522 million and ether $361 million, while trading volume rose 74% to $346.1 billion and open interest fell 3% to $136.3 billion. Bitcoin fell overnight to $76,400, its lowest price since September 18, before recovering part of the decline, and ether momentarily hit $2,170 before rebounding to around $2,220, CoinDesk reported. Technology shares added to the pressure, with Nasdaq-100 futures down 2.3% as Intel slid on weak guidance. Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, Geoffrey Kendrick, said he suspected the negative price action still had some way to go until more detail emerges and frozen assets are released. Against that, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $17 million on Thursday, a fourth straight day of inflows, according to Farside Investors data reported by CoinDesk, in flows recorded before the theft began.

What to watch begins with the levels Friday’s low put in play. Bitcoin’s overnight low of $76,400 sits just below the snapshot price of $76,779, and the $80,000 mark it lost on Thursday sits above it, while Solana’s $100 line sits above its $95.45 print. Options traders have already marked their downside lines: CoinDesk reported that the $74,000 Bitcoin put expiring November 13 leads put volume and that the $2,000 ether put expiring the same day drew more than twice the volume of any other ether option. The next dated markers are operational rather than economic, in any Binance announcement on resuming withdrawals and on the investigation’s findings, and in the U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF flow print after Friday’s session, which will show whether the four-day inflow run survived the hack, ahead of a weekend in which crypto trades around the clock while the equity markets that have been setting its direction are closed.

Educational content — not investment advice. Crypto Pulse is AI-assisted research produced with automated data checks; figures are verified against the cited sources at publication time.