Most Coordinated Attack In Crypto History? What Led To $19 Billion In Losses As Bitcoin Price Crashed

The biggest crypto market crash came and went over the weekend, but the effects still linger on. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and nearly every major digital asset suffered price crashes, and what began as a panic over former US President Donald Trump’s surprise 100% tariff announcement on Chinese tech exports soon spiraled into over $19 billion wiped from the crypto market. 

In the aftermath, some analysts and commentators began piecing together what might have really happened, and many now believe that the crash was not natural but a meticulously coordinated event.

Crypto commentator Ran Neuner was one of the first to argue that the weekend collapse appeared far too orchestrated to be random. In a post on the social media platform X, Reuner pointed out that the sell-off began immediately after US markets closed late on Friday, at a moment when both European and Asian trading desks were asleep. 

At the same time, several major oracles began showing inconsistent price data, liquidity across exchanges evaporated, and many users reported being unable to access trading platforms to buy the dip or close positions.

Furthermore, crypto data platforms like CoinGecko were either offline or displaying incorrect information, so users had no data about the crash. According to Neuner’s assessment, this was not a string of isolated glitches but a chain reaction of failures happening simultaneously across the ecosystem. This looked like some players had pulled the right levers at exactly the right time, and the crash “was a highly coordinated and well executed attack.”

Another theory that has gained traction came from a commentator known as ElonTrades, who proposed that the crash was caused by an exploitation of a weakness within Binance’s internal pricing mechanism. His analysis suggests that the event wasn’t a spontaneous panic but a calculated attack that used Binance’s own systems against itself, with the shock of Trump’s tariff announcement serving as the perfect cover.

According to ElonTrades, Binance’s Unified Account system, which allows traders to use multiple assets as collateral for leveraged positions, had been operating with a significant vulnerability. Instead of relying on external oracle feeds or stable redemption values to mark collateral, the exchange used its own order-book prices. This meant that if someone could manipulate the price of a collateral asset within Binance, they could instantly devalue billions of dollars in margin accounts.

Binance had already announced plans to move to oracle-based pricing, but the rollout wasn’t until October 8. Some traders began dumping $60million to $90 million of USDe and other tokens like wBETH and BNSOL on Binance to force their internal prices down, even though those same assets maintained normal value elsewhere. The artificial plunge in price caused the platform’s margin system to view thousands of leveraged accounts as under-collateralized and caused automatic liquidations.

That localized depeg triggered between $500 million and $1 billion in forced liquidations. At the same time, these actors opened $1.1 billion in BTC/ETH shorts on Hyperliquid to take advantage of the depeg, which eventually netted $192 million in profit. Just as the forced liquidations began, Trump’s 100% tariff announcement hit global headlines, adding panic and confusion to the mix. Within hours, the liquidation chain had spread to other exchanges.

Regardless of the reason behind the crash, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are starting to recover. At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $115,025, up by 2.85 in the past 24 hours. Ethereum is trading at $4,160, up by 8.5% in the past 24 hours.