BNB, the native token of Binance’s ecosystem, climbed to a record high of $1,355 following a turbulent weekend that saw $20 billion wiped from the broader crypto market.
Data from CryptoSlate showed that BNB surged 17% in 24 hours, outperforming other top-ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
The rally came even amid President Donald Trump’s Oct. 10 tariffs on China triggered panic selling across risk assets, including digital currencies. Bitcoin has failed to offer similar strength, sitting $10,000 below its recent all-time high.
So, BNB’s strong price recovery reflected renewed confidence in Binance’s ecosystem despite the exchange’s recent operational issues.
Binance pays $283 million in compensation
Over the weekend, Binance faced strong criticism for its platform’s handling of the extreme price swings that disrupted trading activity.
Many of the exchange users complained of flash crashes that drove several tokens to near-zero levels and frozen accounts that prevented them from closing or hedging their market positions.
These disruptions intensified frustration among traders, who argued that Binance’s dominant position in global trading volume meant it should have been more resilient to market turbulence.
In response, Binance announced it had distributed $283 million in compensation to users affected by severe price dislocations across several products, including USDE, BNSOL, and wBETH.
The exchange attributed the losses to intense volatility and temporary failures in its collateral and pricing modules.
Binance said it reimbursed affected users and pledged to extend redress for delays in transfers and redemptions.
Meanwhile, on-chain analysts speculated that the disruptions could have been triggered by a coordinated exploit targeting Binance’s unified margin system.
Martin Hiesboeck, Head of Research at Uphold, said the malfunction exposed a structural weakness: liquidation prices drew mainly from Binance’s own volatile spot feed instead of aggregated market data. As a result, collateral values fell faster, prompting forced liquidations that deepened the decline.
Hiesboeck noted that the incident appeared timed between a scheduled software patch and its deployment, creating a vulnerability window that may have caused $500 million to $1 billion in cumulative losses.
He warned that the situation echoed systemic risk events such as Terra’s collapse and stressed that centralized risk models remain fragile during extreme volatility.
Binance defends system
However, Binance rejected the notion of a targeted exploit, emphasizing that its core spot and futures engines operated normally during the turmoil.
The company said its internal review showed forced liquidations made up only a minor share of trading volume, suggesting the broader market shock, not an internal error, drove the sell-off.
The exchange also clarified that brief price dips in tokens like IOTX and ATOM resulted from long-standing limit orders. It added that some user dashboards’ “low price” readings were display errors rather than executed trades.
Binance co-founder He Yi also called the circulating attack theories “FUD,” asserting that Binance’s matching engines and settlement systems “remained stable throughout the event.”