When cryptocurrency prices plunged after President Donald Trump announced fresh tariffs, Binance — long seen as the industry’s core liquidity engine — quickly became the focal point of the chaos.
For many Binance users, the exchange’s cross-margin system, which links all assets in a trader’s account as collateral, worsened their losses.
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Was Binance’s Meltdown Organic or a Calculated Exploit?
As prices collapsed, traders reported that Binance’s interface froze during the sell-off, preventing them from closing or hedging positions. Because all assets were tied together, a single margin call triggered total account liquidations instead of partial losses.
This structural weakness led to widespread anger, with some users accusing Binance of profiting from market volatility through liquidation fees.
Although Binance promised compensation for affected customers, it has yet to release a full post-incident report.
That silence created space for speculation, especially after on-chain researcher YQ shared data suggesting that the crash may not have been entirely organic.
YQ’s analysis found that three Binance-listed assets — USDe, wBETH, and BNSOL — lost their pegs within minutes of each other during an internal pricing update.
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At that moment, USDe fell to $0.65, wBETH collapsed to $430 (almost 90% below Ethereum’s value), and BNSOL slid to $34.9.
“The 23-minute gap between general liquidations and the specific asset crashes suggests sequential execution rather than random panic,” the analyst wrote.
Considering this, the analyst estimates suggest the coordinated trades could have extracted between $800 million and $1.2 billion from the market.
“While we cannot definitively prove coordination, the evidence creates reasonable suspicion. The precision, timing, venue-specificity, and profit patterns align too perfectly with what a coordinated attack would look like. Whether through brilliant opportunism or deliberate planning, someone turned Binance’s transparency into vulnerability and extracted nearly a billion dollars in the process,” he concluded.
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Coinbase Transfers Deepen Suspicion of Market Coordination
While attention centered on Binance, fresh blockchain data revealed that Coinbase, the largest US exchange, also made notable movements before the downturn.
Analytics firm Meta Financial AI (MEFAI) discovered that Coinbase transferred 1,066 BTC from a cold wallet to a hot wallet shortly before prices began to tumble.
Around the same time, a newly created wallet — allegedly owned by a US” investor — purchased 1,100 BTC from Binance and sent it to Coinbase.
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These actions raised eyebrows because Coinbase primarily handles large institutional trades through its over-the-counter (OTC) desk, not retail orders.
Such transactions usually involve ETF issuers, hedge funds, or corporate treasuries that want to buy Bitcoin discreetly without influencing market prices.
Considering this, MEFAI noted that the timing of these movements may have intensified selling pressure already mounting in the market.
“The sales that happen here are made to institutions. Their own arbitrage and pricing bots balance the price. It operates on a spot basis. [Coinbase] is the most difficult place to sell 1,000 BTC as a retail user, because it is hard to find a non-institutional investor on the other side to buy that 1,000 BTC,” MEFAI concluded.
Despite the claims, no clear evidence ties the Binance and Coinbase events together.
Still, the synchronized wallet activity, overlapping timing, and sharp market impact have deepened industry suspicion that the crash was more than a coincidence.
