Crypto alarm clock: Bitcoin and altcoins plummet after historic cyberattack at Binance

Yesterday was a sad day for the crypto industry. Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world, has lost over $6 million in crypto to hackers. Bitcoin (BTC) has made a taste of things and altcoins already have a sledgehammer to deal with.

At first, the crypto market was already hit last night by the huge declines on Wall Street. Amazon went down 12 percent after the quarterly figures and Intel even collapsed 23 percent. But it only really started to fumble when reports circulated that Binance might have been hacked.

That happened around 9:30 pm our time and Bitcoin was worth just over $80,000 at the time. In fifteen minutes, the price went down by 2 percent and then founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao confirmed that the platform was probably hacked. After midnight, the price went down a little further.

In the evening, we still thought that about 2.5 billion dollars in crypto had been stolen, but that amount has now risen to a fortune of 6.3 billion dollars. That is more than four times as much as the previous robbery at crypto exchange Bybit, which then marked the largest crypto hack ever.

Stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle have managed to freeze USDT and USDC for a total of $3 billion. That means the hackers still have $3.3 billion in their hands. According to this live tracker, only 1/10th of that amount has been dumped on the market at this time.

The good news is that Binance had already said last night that all losses will be compensated. But it is a big blow to confidence in the crypto country. If even your coins aren't safe with the largest crypto platform in the world, where are they?

Bitcoin seems to have recovered a bit and has picked up a bit in the middle of the night. The daily chart doesn't even look that bad either: the price has rebounded from the support level that also did its job last month. And Bitcoin also remains just above the 50-week average.

At the time of writing, the BTC price is at 78,453 dollars, 1.85 percent lower than 24 hours ago. In euros, 70,177 are now paid for the largest crypto.

The rest of the market is suffering just as much from the news. Ethereum (ETH) is lost 2.90 percent, Ripple (XRP) 4.51 percent and Solana (SOL) 1.87 percent.

Hyperliquid (HYPE) is still up 17.94 percent. Yesterday, the altcoin was unstoppable after the news of the cooperation with the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), intended to enter the US market.

The biggest loser within the top twenty is NEAR Protocol (NEAR) with a minus of 3.72 percent. Within the broader top 100, that is Curve Dao Token (CRV) with a decline of 15.99 percent.