BTC Bounces Off $76,500 After $6.36B Binance Hack: Is the Bottom In?

What are traders doing after the Binance hack?

Retail investors are buying the dip with leverage. Larger players are hedging. US buyers stayed on the sidelines. OKX, Deribit, and Coinbase each show a different side of the story. More accounts opened long positions. On OKX, the long-to-short account ratio jumped from 1.80 at 19:00 UTC on Thursday, one hour before the hack, to 2.72 at 03:00 on Friday. It has since moderated to 2.25. Open interest rose as the price fell. Open interest in Bitcoin futures on OKX, the value of open contracts, grew 9%, from $3.42 billion to $3.73 billion as the price dropped. New positions were opened, not old ones closed. The funding rate did not flip. The rate that longs pay shorts on OKX stayed positive through the crash, at 0.01% at midnight and 0.0055% at 08:00 UTC. A true flush would have turned it negative. Options traders bought protection.

On Deribit, 30,846 BTC in put options were traded in 24 hours, versus 18,912 BTC in call options, meaning 1.63 puts for every call. The implied volatility index jumped from 36.2 to 39.6 and has already pulled back to 37.5. US buyers hesitated. Bitcoin on Coinbase traded up to $218 below the Binance price overnight, double the pre-hack spread, showing US demand did not step in. ETF money has not given a clear answer yet. US spot Bitcoin funds received $17.2 million on Thursday, but trades closed before the first Binance wallet was drained at 20:05 UTC. Friday's flows will be the first real measure. This combination is the problem for anyone calling a bottom. Liquidations hit about $1.55 billion, but leverage has returned above its initial level, and buying the dip with long positions is fuel for the next flush if $76,500 breaks.

Is the bottom in for Bitcoin?

History says probably not. In four of the six major crypto exchange hacks, Bitcoin set a lower low 11 to 24 days later, between 14.6% and 46.3% below the pre-hack closing price. The closest precedent is Bybit, the previous record of $1.5 billion, operated by the same North Korean group that TRM Labs accuses of the current incident. Bitcoin closed at $98,305 the day before that hack on February 21, 2025. The low was hit at $76,606 on March 11, 18 days later, a 22.1% drop. The exception was the actual 2019 Binance hack, when 7,000 BTC were stolen. The low appeared on the day of the hack, and Bitcoin was up 35% a week later. The 2020 KuCoin hack left only a minor price dip. None of these drops had a single cause.

Bitcoin price analysis: Can Bitcoin hold the 200-day moving average?

The 2025 drop coincided with Trump's tariff threats, and the August 2024 low with a global market sell-off. The hack is rarely the only story, but it tends to hit an already fragile market, and this market is exactly in that state. There is also a direct supply risk. TRM Labs claims the attacker still holds the 18,270 BTC stolen from Binance, worth about $1.42 billion at current prices, and is already splitting them into chunks of 1,000 and 100 BTC. The coins are expected to move through bridges, swap services, and OTC brokers, leaving a large seller hanging over the market.

It held on the first test. The Friday low of $76,500 on Binance was $30 above the 200-day exponential moving average at $76,470, and buyers stepped in right there. Bitcoin now sits between this line and the 50-day moving average at $80,600, which was lost on Thursday. The three-month chart shows why $76,500 matters. Bitcoin spent late August and early September in a range between $74,968 and $82,300 before breaking out to $87,396 on September 21. The hack pushed it back into the lower half of that range. Resistance: $80,600, the 50-day moving average, then $81,971, Thursday's high.