Bitcoin Resilience Noted Post-Binance Hack, Strive CEO Reports

Strive CEO Remains Bullish on Bitcoin Despite Binance Hack, Cautions on Market Bottom

The recent $6.3 billion hack of cryptocurrency exchange Binance has not altered Strive CEO Matt Cole’s long-term outlook on Bitcoin, though he cautioned that it remains too early to definitively call a market bottom.

Cole stated that Bitcoin has demonstrated resilience, performing better than anticipated in the wake of the significant breach. Speaking on Cointelegraph’s Chain Reaction program, he characterized the attack on Binance’s wallets as akin to a bank robbery, distinct from a fundamental failure of Bitcoin’s underlying network.

As of Saturday at 4:00 pm, Bitcoin was trading near $77,400, approximately 4% lower than its price just before the attack commenced on Thursday, according to CoinGecko data. Strive, a publicly traded entity that holds Bitcoin on its balance sheet, reported an ownership of 43,000 BTC as of October 23.

“I have conviction that over any reasonable time frame, this does not change the investment thesis on Bitcoin,” Cole asserted. He noted that Bitcoin’s price decline was less severe than he had expected, considering the magnitude of the breach and general market weakness. However, he acknowledged the difficulty in determining if the cryptocurrency has reached its lowest point.

Cole described the current market sentiment as being in an “early spring” recovery phase, potentially extending for another six to nine months, with prices expected to rise gradually rather than experience a sharp surge to new record highs.

Echoing Cole’s sentiment, Paul Chapman, financial crime director at Wirex, emphasized the distinction between the Binance incident and a compromise of the Bitcoin network itself. “It’s important to be clear that Bitcoin itself hasn’t been hacked — this was an attack on one company’s systems, not the network,” he told Cointelegraph.

Scale of Binance Hack Unprecedented

According to data from Glassnode, Thursday’s Binance breach stands as the largest cryptocurrency hack on record, impacting approximately $6.3 billion. This figure surpasses the combined losses of the next nine largest hacks. The previous record was the $1.5 billion exploit of Bybit in February 2025. Glassnode further noted that three of the ten largest crypto hacks have occurred since the beginning of 2025, all involving cryptocurrency exchanges.

In comparison, following the Bybit hack in 2025, Bitcoin experienced a decline of roughly 5%, dropping from nearly $100,000 to around $95,000 amidst the breach and broader market volatility, according to a Bitfinex market report. Data from Anchorage Digital, cited by CNBC, indicated that Bitcoin’s average decline in the first 24 hours following previous crypto exchange exploits was 8.3%.

Blockaid CEO Ido Ben-Natan suggested that the attackers likely compromised Binance’s transaction signing process. Binance stated on Friday that it had found no evidence of leaked wallet private keys, although its investigation is ongoing. Blockaid’s analysis identified an Ethereum transaction containing 50 signed authorizations for various transactions. A matching authorization reportedly allowed attacker-controlled code to operate through the wallet. Ben-Natan posited that pre-signing checks could have prevented the malicious authorization.