Funds are SAFU. The loot is not.
Here is why North Korea cannot repeat the Bybit escape.
THE BYBIT PLAYBOOK, FEB 2025
The same group stole ~400K+ ETH from Bybit and washed it fast:
• Day 5: ~145K ETH laundered, about 30% (SpotOnChain)
• Day 7: 270K ETH gone, over half (Lookonchain)
• Done in about 10 days
The exits: THORChain for ETH to BTC, eXch, and the OKX Web3 DEX aggregator.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THOSE EXITS
• eXch: shut down in April 2025, citing a DOJ whistleblower and an active transatlantic operation.
• OKX: paused its DEX aggregator, then relaunched it with real time abuse detection and blocking.
• THORChain: this time the FBI is pressing its node operators directly, and swaps went dark.
• The FBI itself: Bybit's address list came out 5 days after the hack. This time, 600+ addresses flagged within days.
PROOF, ONCHAIN, 2 NOV
Bybit's hacker had washed ~30% of the ETH by day 5.
Binance's hacker, day 4:
522,409 ETH parked in 8 wallets. Transactions sent: 0.
18,270 BTC. Satoshis moved: 0.
$161M in wBETH, XAUt, USD1, PAXG. Touched: 0.
Laundered from the big pile: 0%.
The playbook that worked in 2025 has been burned. Every door they used then has a guard on it now. So they scrape crumbs on Tron and Solana, while $2.8B sits in plain sight, watched by everyone.
On the other side, Binance reopened withdrawals, paid out $3.64B in net outflows, and says 95% of the impact is already covered.
The users are whole. The thieves are stuck.
Funds are SAFU. The loot is not. 🔶
October on BNB Chain, measured straight from the chain and set next to the others:
• Speed: one block every 0.45 seconds. It was 3.00 seconds for five years. Ethereum: 12.
• Cost: a basic transfer is $0.0008 today. On Ethereum: $0.0098.
• Binance withdrawals in one day: about 314,000 on BNB Chain, about 44,000 on Ethereum.
• Lifetime: Binance's hot wallets have sent 362.7 million transactions on BNB Chain and about 106 million on Ethereum, which had a three year head start.
• Tokenized real world assets: 2.12 million holders on BNB Chain. Solana 842,000. Ethereum 289,000.
• The typical USDT withdrawal: $50. One in three ends in .99, because the fee is one cent.
• Poison: 1.1% of stablecoin transfers on BNB Chain are fake zero transfers. On Ethereum: 13.5%.
No press releases. Just public nodes and patience.
More in November. 🔶
Address poisoning, measured on four chains.
The trick: a scammer sends you a fake 0 USDT transfer, so a look alike address appears in your history, with the same first and last characters as one you use. One careless copy later, the money is gone.
We sampled 24 hours of USDT and USDC transfers on each chain. Share that were exactly zero:
• Ethereum: 13.5%, about 177,000 a day
• Base: 2.7%
• BNB Chain: 1.1%
• Arbitrum: 0.4%
On BNB Chain, all 40 zero transfers we opened were sent by a stranger, not the account owner. The textbook pattern.
Ethereum's poison rate is 12 times BNB Chain's, even though a basic transfer on BNB Chain costs about 12 times less ($0.0008 vs $0.0098 today).
It is not small. A USENIX Security 2025 study counted 270 million attempts and 17 million victims on Ethereum and BNB Chain from 2022 to 2024, with at least $83.8M stolen.
What's being done:
• Binance's security researchers built a detector that pairs look alike addresses with their targets and feeds them to HashDit.
• Trust Wallet checks every destination against a database of known scam and look alike addresses before you sign, on 32 chains including BNB Chain.
• On Binance, you can lock withdrawals to an address whitelist.
Your part:
1. Never copy an address from your history.
2. Use an address book or a whitelist.
3. Read the whole address.
Stay SAFU. 🔶
We checked one number three times this month: people holding tokenized real world assets on BNB Chain.
10 Oct: 2,021,737
13 Oct: 2,041,462
26 Oct: 2,119,204
About 6,000 new holders a day.
Ethereum's total, for scale: 288,631.
We read BNB Chain's gas price on the 25th of every month since January 2025. Median of real transactions:
Jan 2025: 1 gwei. A simple transfer: $0.014
May 2025: 0.11 gwei. $0.0015
Oct 2025 to today: 0.05 gwei. $0.0009
17 times cheaper, with BNB higher than it was then.
Binance Futures, last 24 hours, $46.9B traded.
$12.65B of it, 27%, wasn't crypto.
SanDisk $1.86B. A 3x chip ETF $1.74B. Gold $1.40B. Crude oil $943M.
One in four futures dollars on Binance now goes to stocks, metals and oil.
11 Dec 2025: Binance Futures lists its first market that isn't crypto. Gold.
Today there are 221,
187 US stocks, Samsung and SK Hynix, Tencent and BYD, oil, silver, copper, the Brazilian real. Even OpenAI and Anthropic, before their IPOs.
Ten months, one app.
Binance bStocks, 11 June: 5 stocks.
21 October: 100.
132 days. From Apple and NVIDIA to Berkshire Hathaway, the S&P 500 and China's STAR Market 50.
Wall Street, listed one ticker at a time.
In 2018, Warren Buffett called bitcoin "probably rat poison squared."
Since yesterday, you can convert bitcoin straight into Berkshire Hathaway on Binance.
$5 buys almost 1% of a share.
MEFAI's BTC daily signals this year, all five:
30 Jan SELL $84,605
14 Mar BUY $70,896
15 May SELL $78,961
12 Jul BUY $63,783
14 Oct SELL $83,126
Following only the buys: +45%.
Buys and sells both ways: +101%.
Holding BTC since 30 Jan: down 4%.
