The Binance hack triggered more than $1.5 billion in forced liquidations and drove large traders to buy downside protection in the options market. A Standard Chartered analyst predicts the hack could accelerate a shift toward decentralized exchanges.
The roughly $6.3 billion Binance hack sent bitcoin and ether lower on Thursday and Friday, setting off a chain reaction across the leveraged crypto market. While the exchange itself has paused withdrawals and deposits during its investigation, data from the options and futures markets shows how the biggest players actually reacted as the news spread – and what questions the incident now raises about where trading moves next.
According to CoinGlass data, forced liquidations across the crypto market reached around $1.5 billion over 24 hours, a sharp jump from normal levels. Bitcoin accounted for around $499 million and ether for around $358 million of that total, while Solana, XRP, and dogecoin made up the rest. About 84 percent of the liquidations were long positions – bets on rising prices that were force-closed as prices fell. Binance accounted for nearly half of the total volume, with Hyperliquid and Bybit the next-largest venues.
In the options market, large players bought protection against further declines while the hack was still unfolding. According to trading platform Paradigm, the first big trade came just minutes after the first funds left Binance's wallets, and before the news was public: a put option trade worth around $20 million in notional value. Over the following eight hours, Paradigm traded options worth around $590 million in notional bitcoin value, roughly half of all comparable volume on the options exchange Deribit over the same period. According to Paradigm's Nicolas Quatravaux, the pattern looked more like positioning for a short-term pullback than bets on a deep crash.
Even as downside risk was being priced in, several technical signals pointed to a possible bottom being near. Bitcoin's RSI indicator fell to around 34, its lowest since late June, nearing the technical "oversold" level. On shorter timeframes, the indicator showed what analysts call a bullish divergence: the price set a new low while the RSI reading did not, which can suggest that selling pressure is starting to fade. In the final hour before the article was written, short positions being force-closed accounted for nearly the entire liquidation volume – which can itself help lift the price, since closing a short requires buying.
Geoffrey Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, believes the hack could help accelerate an already ongoing shift of trading from centralized exchanges like Binance toward decentralized exchanges (DEXs). That is the analyst's own assessment, not a confirmed development. Kendrick points out that DEXs have never suffered this type of security breach, and that he is maintaining his $100 price target for the Uniswap token UNI toward 2030. He stresses that investors should wait for the market impact of the hack to play out before drawing conclusions. According to CoinGecko data, the top ten DEXs accounted for 23.5 percent of trading volume relative to centralized exchanges in the second quarter of 2026, up from the quarter before – but the link to the Binance hack itself is, for now, Kendrick's own thesis, not a measured effect.
Sources: Cointelegraph, Coindesk
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