Bitcoin (BTC) fell about 4% Friday, Oct. 30, as Binance disclosed a security incident affecting an estimated $6.3 billion in token assets and U.S. technology shares slid amid concerns about artificial-intelligence spending. CNBC reported BTC at $77,065 at 1:34 p.m. ET. At Friday’s close, the Nasdaq Composite stood at 25,437, down 747.73 points, or 2.9%; the Associated Press linked the technology-share decline to doubts about returns from heavy AI investment.
Binance placed the hot-wallet compromise at 4:05 p.m. ET (20:05 UTC) on Oct. 29 and said the Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) and corporate treasury would absorb the losses. Of the more than $6.34 billion Binance said it had reserved to address the incident, $5 billion was in affected tokens; it separately put the amount frozen on-chain at about $3 billion. Binance also said customer funds were safe and withdrawals had been paused for security checks, while deposits and unaffected services remained available.
Binance’s initial review raised the possibility that an attacker entered a service container through a DevOps engineer’s compromised laptop. The exchange reported no indication that wallet private keys had been exposed; a later update said investigators had identified additional breach points but were still establishing the attack sequence. Binance planned to publish an updated proof-of-reserves report by Nov. 2 and a technical postmortem after the investigation.
