This morning, Binance announced a $1 billion purchase of bitcoin ($BTC) from its SAFU fund. Unfortunately, the swap from its stablecoin reserves did little to repair confidence from catastrophic liquidations that originated on the exchange during the October 10, 2025 crypto crash.
On that date, Donald Trump threatened China with an unprecedented, 100% import tariff rate. Investors duly panicked.
As a result, $BTC tanked 14% while smaller digital assets experienced even worse sell-offs. At its worst moment, the native coin of Cosmos’ blockchain traded 99.99% lower on Binance.
Rumors (which Binance never confirmed) circulated that the exchange or one of CZ’s funds secretly stepped in with their own capital to buy unfairly cheap coins during the panic.
True or not, skeptics are still unconvinced that Binance has made markets whole since that incident three months ago, and are using today’s news to reiterate their dissatisfaction.
At its $83,000 price at time of writing, $BTC is down 32% from its $122,000 start on October 10. The asset also traded over $80 billion worth of volume over the last 24 hours, adding further doubt to the meaningful impact of Binance’s $1 billion buy.
Crypto markets haven’t recovered since October 10
Two days after the October 10 incident, a viral post from ElonTrades placed blame for $19 billion worth of liquidations mostly on Binance.
The skeptic questioned Binance’s oracle design flaw and a cross-margin, Unified Account problem with the USDE stablecoin.
On that day, curiously low prices for many assets only existed on Binance. Moreover, Binance partially, tacitly admitted to the idiosyncratic role it played in certain trading pair crashes by paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution, while disclaiming any actual responsibility in those same blog posts.
Read more: Mapping Binance’s globe-trotting empire
Specifically, Binance paid $283 million to “Futures, Margin, and Loan users who held USDE, BNSOL, and WBETH as collateral and were impacted by the depeg.”
In addition, the company committed $100 million in low-interest loans plus $300 million in Rewards Hub vouchers “to eligible users who lost at least $50 during a forced liquidation.”
Moreover, Binance paid another $45 million to BNB memecoin investors who lost money.
Unimpressed by those payouts after $19 billion worth of industry-wide liquidations and mark-to-market losses of up to $600 billion during its worst moments, lawyers quickly invited victims to join class action lawsuits.
The head of OKX called Binance’s damage from October 10 “real and lasting.”
