The post Attack on Binance? Crypto meltdowns are starting to rhyme appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. Today’s subject is an unsolved mystery of crypto market microstructure. We only have so many facts, and we’ll likely never know all the details. To get up to speed with the fundamentals of what happened over the weekend, I recommend the Empire livestream from Sunday with Doug Colkitt, as well as Doug’s helpful X thread on Auto-Deleveraging. For those wanting the quick and dirty headline summary, here goes.  For some silly reason, Binance was using spot prices to value three tokens accepted as collateral for margin positions — liquid staking derivatives wBETH and BNSOL, alongside Ethena’s synthetic dollar USDE. Not exactly a problem when Binance’s order books for those tokens were thick with bids on either side. But they’d quickly dried up around the time that bitcoin and other coins started dumping on word that Trump’s trade war with China would persist, leading prices to slip well below par, and in the case of the two staking derivatives, almost to zero. Bad news for anyone using the affected coins as collateral for margin trading on Binance. Suddenly their collateral wasn’t considered valuable enough to cover their position — even though prices remained much more stable elsewhere — and they were liquidated.  At the same time, leveraged traders on perps DEXs like Hyperliquid, many incentivized to take margin by points campaigns for airdrops, were also hit as a result of second-order price effects.  So, if you’re after an analogy, it’s easiest to consider Binance as the epicenter of an earthquake. Had Binance valued USDE, wBETH and BNSOL using an index or some other pricing system, rather than its own illiquid spot markets, maybe there would have been no earthquake at all. The Ethena protocol was still redeeming USDE…

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Filed under: News - @ October 15, 2025 2:27 pm