From Yesterday's Simply Bitcoin Live | Episode 1625
The Numbers
Bitcoin is holding under $80K even as the largest crypto hack in history is still unwinding in real time.
The News
Binance restored withdrawals in phases starting at 6 UTC on November 1. Between then and 1530 UTC, it processed $4.65 billion in withdrawals against $1.01 billion in deposits, a net outflow of $3.64 billion. Binance calls that 2.1% of its reported $171 billion in assets. Other trackers, including Coin Bureau, put the real number closer to $6.1 billion.
The same weekend, Chainalysis, the firm whose reports pinned North Korea's Lazarus Group as the hacker behind Friday's $6.3 billion Binance theft, disclosed its own breach hours later. The FBI and Secret Service confirmed Lazarus within days, an unusually fast turnaround for this kind of case. CZ thanked both agencies for protecting "the broader financial markets," the same contagion logic Elizabeth Warren uses against crypto.
Binance says its SAFU fund covers most of the $3.9 billion in losses, and only 15 of its networks are back online. The majority of its reserves sit in its own BNB token, not exactly liquid. Ray Youssef, the Paxful co-founder, says he has called Binance insolvent for two years. The setup looks a lot like FTX in its final weeks.
Not your keys, not your coins. Binance just handed out another reminder of why that phrase exists.
BTC Pay Server confirmed hot wallet thefts on servers still running version 2.4.1 or earlier, the version patched back in August. Attackers used a different exploit method than the one BTC Pay Server already fixed. Anyone who skipped the update got drained. Wallets with keys held off the server, hardware wallets included, were untouched.
Hours later, Brazilian exchange Marcato Bitcoin froze deposits and withdrawals after a breach. The company says no customer funds or data were compromised, but security firm Hypernative tracked more than $40 million in suspicious transfers across ten blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, and Tron.
Self-custody beats a hot wallet nobody updated.
The Culture
Guest SegmentMason from Stand With Crypto joined the show ahead of Tuesday's midterms, where Republicans risk losing the House and Senate just as the Clarity Act is gaining momentum. His point: the strategic Bitcoin reserve is an executive order, not law, so it survives a flip in Congress. Codifying it does not happen without friendly lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Stand With Crypto has 223 candidates filling out its policy questionnaire this cycle, up from 96 in 2024, and most of the new submissions are Democrats. Of the roughly 67 million Americans who own crypto, Mason's case is that even 3 million voting as a consistent bloc is enough to swing tight races, and that consistency is what keeps lawmakers courting the vote instead of ignoring it.
Show up once and you're a blip. Show up twice and you're a voting bloc.
Opti breaks down why Chainalysis got hacked the same day it was tracking the Binance thieves, and why the FBI's response was faster than anyone has seen before.
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