Institutions Pull Assets From Exchanges After Binance Security Incident

After Binance’s Oct. 29 incident, institutional crypto investors shifted assets away from centralized exchanges while adjusting their trading books.

The investors’ firms, total withdrawals and destinations were not disclosed.

In its Oct. 30 update, Binance put the incident’s estimated impact near $6.3 billion and said roughly $3 billion in affected assets had been immobilized on-chain. Binance said its preliminary inquiry identified a possible compromise of a DevOps engineer’s laptop as a way unauthorized withdrawals could have been initiated. The exchange reported no indication that wallet private keys had leaked and said its Secure Asset Fund for Users and company funds would pay for losses.

Geoffrey Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, said in an email: “I suspect the negative price action still has some way to go.” He said a new market base would come only after assets were unfrozen and more details emerged.

TokenPost previously covered Kendrick’s separate comments on Uniswap and decentralized exchanges in an Oct. 30 story.