MarketVector Indexes has analysed 15 previous crypto exchange hacks. In all five completed cases, the hacked exchange's own token lost to bitcoin by up to 70 percentage points over the following 90 days – a pattern that could now hit BNB.
– Whether the issuer could freeze the stolen token mattered more for the price than the fact it had been stolen at all, writes Martin Leinweber, who leads digital asset research and strategy at MarketVector Indexes.
Binance was hit on 29 October by the largest crypto theft on record, with a confirmed loss of $6.3bn from the company's hot wallets. MarketVector Indexes, which produces a range of crypto indices, used real-time data from its own MarketVector Digital Assets 100 Index to measure the market reaction hour by hour after the hack, and compared it with 15 previous exchange hacks since 2016. Leinweber is behind the analysis.
MarketVector reviewed 15 exchange hacks from Bitfinex in 2016 to Bitget this September, excluding the FTX collapse because it was an insolvency rather than a hack. Bitcoin itself shows no clear pattern after such events – its price path 30 and 90 days after a hack looks like an ordinary period for bitcoin.
The same is not true of the exchange's own token. In all five completed cases, the hacked exchange's token lost to bitcoin over the following 90 days: KuCoin's KCS by 68 percentage points, HTX's HT by 70 percentage points, Binance's own BNB by 34 percentage points after the 2019 hack, WazirX's WRX by 27 percentage points and BitMart's BMX by 6 percentage points. Bitget's BGB is 4 percentage points behind bitcoin 36 days after its September hack, though that case is not yet complete.
The closest precedent is Binance's own 2019 hack, when attackers took around $40m. Binance covered the loss from its own SAFU insurance fund, and BNB fell 7% on day one before recovering against bitcoin within two weeks. Even so, BNB ended 34 percentage points behind bitcoin once the 90 days were up.
Today's theft is roughly 150 times larger. Fourteen hours after Binance's wallets were drained of $6.3bn, BNB was already down 5.7% – 1.8 percentage points behind bitcoin, which itself fell 3.9%. The 2019 precedent suggests it is the coming months, not the first hours, that will decide how hard BNB is hit.
MarketVector also tested how much short-term resilience is actually worth. The firm reviewed 41 sharp bitcoin sell-offs since 2018, in which bitcoin fell at least 8% over two days, and ranked the other cryptocurrencies by how well they held up over the first two days.
The tokens that held up best early on went on to lag the ones that fell the most in the same sell-off – in 63% of cases over the following 30 days, and in 68% of cases over the following 90 days. The takeaway is that how a token behaves in the first hours after a shock says little about how it will hold up over time.
The biggest open risk ahead is not stolen stablecoins, which several issuers have already frozen, but stolen ether, which no one can freeze. The attacker still holds 195,460 ether, worth around $435m, and has not moved it.
After the Bybit hack in February 2025, carried out by the same group according to analytics firms, the attackers laundered around 499,000 stolen ether over roughly ten days, mostly by converting it to bitcoin via the service THORChain. Ether fell 17% against bitcoin within three weeks. So far, the ether/bitcoin rate is down just 0.7% since the Binance hack, but if the attackers follow the same pattern as after Bybit, this is likely where the next move comes from.
Sources: MarketVector Indexes, Martin Leinweber
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