Ethena ENA Falls 7% After Binance Hacker Sells $33.93M of the Token

Update: October 30, 15:01 UTC

Binance said it allocated $6.34 billion of its own funds and reserves to cover losses from the hack, according to The Block. About $5 billion is held in the affected assets, and about $1.3 billion is being bought through market and OTC channels, which could take longer because of thin liquidity and settlement delays. Withdrawals remain suspended, while deposits are still possible.

Tether froze over $1.57 billion in USDT and Circle over $800 million in USDC, The Block reported. Ripple froze about $200 million, and World Liberty Financial with BitGo froze about $27 million in stablecoins plus $2 million in its own tokens. Roughly $3 billion in frozen assets sits outside the reserve.

TRM Labs said the attacker used an EIP-7702 delegation to turn a Binance hot wallet into a sweeper, with 50 authorizations signed in advance, according to Decrypt. TRM said funds also left Binance wallets on nine other chains through ordinary signed transfers, pointing to compromised hot wallet signing infrastructure rather than an Ethereum flaw. TRM and Chainalysis both attributed the theft to North Korea's TraderTraitor group, the Decrypt report said. Binance has not attributed it to any group, per The Block.

Binance co-CEO Richard Teng said the initial investigation pointed to a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop that gave access to a service container used to submit unauthorized withdrawals, and no private key leak was found, The Block reported. Decrypt said Binance has since found "additional points of breach."

Decrypt put the total at $6.4 billion, moved from wallets on 10 blockchains, most of it within about 20 minutes. Bitcoinist said the targeted wallet was Binance 14, which lost about $2.5 billion, including roughly 167,464 ETH and about $1.6 billion in USDT.

Original report: October 30, 13:42 UTC

217.5 million ENA. $33.93 million. That is what the attacker behind Binance's $6.3 billion security breach reportedly dumped, and ENA paid for it: down 7.26% to $0.18653 on October 30.

Lookonchain reported the sale. The hacker swapped the ENA for Ethereum at an average price near $0.16, alongside six other tokens, for a total of 70,480 ETH worth $158.25 million. Other disposals included 7.02 million UNI for $39.63 million and 7.77 trillion PEPE for $31.66 million. LINK, AAVE, ONDO and WLD were also sold.

ENA traded between $0.166247 and $0.217081 over 24 hours on $1.38 billion in volume. It is down 27.86% over the past month.

Santiment data shows ENA fell more than 16% in the four-hour window around the attack, against roughly 4% for Ethereum. That produced ENA's lowest four-hour close since September 18. Bitcoin lost more than 3% in the period. Total crypto market cap fell by about the same amount.

The breach

The exploit hit on October 29. It abused an Ethereum wallet authorization mechanism that let attackers redirect funds from a Binance hot wallet. Investigators have linked it to North Korean cybercriminals, and Binance's investigation is ongoing. It has been described as the largest hack against any crypto exchange, and the sell-off it set off dragged XRP to a multi-month low of $1.19.

USDe held up

Ethena's stablecoin wobbled but did not break. USDe briefly slipped to $0.9974 at 04:00 UTC on October 30. Its Ethereum supply changed by about $1.5 million, against a typical daily move of about $21 million. sUSDe, the staked version, saw supply fall about 1.1%.

Ethena had previously said its collateral exposed to centralized exchanges is held through off-exchange custody, with core USDe minting and redemption operational.

Levels and positioning

Lookonchain also flagged a separate wallet that deposited 2 million USDC into Hyperliquid and opened a 3x leveraged long on 22.78 million ENA, valued at $4.09 million. Bullish bet. It does not prove the selling pressure is over.

Resistance sits near $0.20 and $0.22. Support is near $0.18 and $0.1658. Lose $0.1658 and $0.15 and $0.14 come into view. Analyst Ali Martinez had already flagged a descending channel on ENA's four-hour chart days earlier.

Context

ENA was already weak going in. In August the Ethena foundation proposed sending 95% of net revenue from Ethena-branded businesses to ENA buybacks once USDe supply hits $7.5 billion. Supply was below $5 billion at the time. In October, StablecoinX's revised agreement removed contractual lockups on its ENA holdings. It kept foundation approval requirements for certain sales, plus a five-day foundation right to buy proposed sale tokens.

The split is stark. ENA fell roughly four times as hard as Ethereum in the four-hour window. USDe slipped by well under half a cent, and its supply barely moved.