Home / Blog / 30 October 2026

News · Oct 30, 2026 · 3 min read

Bitcoin today: Binance hacked for $6.3 billion, bitcoin falls to $78,000, difficulty up 5.5%

Binance says about $6.3 billion was stolen on Thursday and about $3 billion is frozen. Bitcoin fell 4% to about $78,000 and $1.53 billion of leveraged bets were closed. Difficulty rose 5.54%. A coin still costs under a quarter of its price to make.

Firsthand card: "Bitcoin today: Binance hacked for $6.3 billion, bitcoin falls to $78,000, difficulty up 5.5%"

Binance says hackers took about $6.3 billion on Thursday

Binance estimates about $6.3 billion of assets were stolen on Thursday 29 October and says about $3 billion has been frozen, according to CoinDesk, which calls it the biggest crypto hack in history. Deposits and withdrawals are suspended, and Binance says it will cover the losses.

About 18,270 of the stolen coins are bitcoin, split across 19 wallets that had not sent a coin by 04:23 UTC on Friday. The full account, with who is blamed and what is frozen, is in our standalone piece on the hack.

Binance's first account is that a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop let an attacker into a service container, and it says it has found no evidence of a leaked wallet private key. TRM Labs traced the attack to the North Korean group TraderTraitor with "high confidence", though no government has said so, and the tokens Tether and Circle could freeze account for more than $2.3 billion of the frozen total.

The largest crypto theft on record, and the bitcoin has not moved.

Bitcoin fell 4% and longs took $1.29 billion of the damage

Bitcoin closed Thursday at $81,275 in our series and was at $77,990 on Friday. Traders were forced out of $1.53 billion of leveraged positions in 24 hours, $1.29 billion of them longs, per CoinGlass figures in CoinDesk. Our liquidations chart shows the day still filling in.

Chart: Futures positions force-closed each day, longs below the line. The last bar is a partial day. Open the chart

Polymarket was breached and institutions pulled coins off exchanges

Polymarket suspended international trading after hackers drained more than $2.6 million from user accounts, CoinDesk reported. It is a separate incident from Binance's.

Institutional investors are withdrawing assets from centralised exchanges and rebalancing trading books, according to CoinDesk, citing unnamed people. How much has gone, and where, was not clear.

Strategy reported $19.53 billion of third-quarter profit

Strategy said its third-quarter net income was $19.53 billion, driven by a $20.91 billion gain on its bitcoin, and that it held 848,517 bitcoin on 25 October, The Block reported. Holders of its preferred shares also approved daily dividend accrual, with 99.3% of votes in favour.

US ETFs took in $137 million on Wednesday

US spot bitcoin ETFs took in $137.3 million on Wednesday 28 October after $176.0 million on Tuesday, on our ETF flows chart. Thursday's figure is not out yet, so the first read on how funds reacted to the hack comes next.

Difficulty rose 5.54% to 148.36 trillion

The network's difficulty adjusted upward at 19:14 UTC on Thursday, the second rise in a row after 5.92% on 16 October, on our difficulty adjustments page. Every machine on the network now earns about 5% fewer coins for the same hashrate. Network hashprice was 0.000445 bitcoin per petahash a day.

What it means for miners

A theft at an exchange moves the dollar price of a coin. It does not change how many coins a machine makes. Difficulty does, and it just rose 5.54%.

On our best case, an Antminer S23 XP Hyd at 8.9 J/TH on Nigeria's 3.9¢ power, electricity makes a bitcoin for about $18,706 at today's hashprice. Bitcoin was $77,990 in our series on Friday, so a coin costs 24% of its price to make. That is electricity only, and output is not guaranteed.

A coin that costs $18,706 to make was on the market for $77,990.

Sources and further reading

Disclosure

Firsthand Bitcoin sells and hosts mining hardware, including this machine. No manufacturer, distributor or affiliate programme paid for or reviewed this page and we take no commission on the links above. Historical figures are computed from daily bitcoin price and network hashprice, each day valued at its own prices. Nothing here is investment advice.