18,270 BITCOIN LEFT BINANCE’S HOT WALLET IN BLOCK 973,732 — SPLIT INTO 19 ADDRESSES, 17 HOLDING 1,000 EACH — NONE HAD MOVED BY BLOCK 973,809

At 4:20 p.m. ET on October 29, block 973,732 carried 11 transactions out of bc1qm34l…s3h, the address Binance pays bitcoin withdrawals from, to a single new address, bc1q0mtc…2mnm. Together they moved 18,270.2 bitcoin. In the same block, that address started peeling off 1,000 coins at a time into fresh addresses. A last 437.7 landed in a 19th address in block 973,738, at 4:48 p.m.

We followed every output on mempool.space and checked against blockstream.info. Seventeen addresses hold 1,000 bitcoin each, one holds 832.5 and one holds 437.7, plus dust strangers keep sending. At block 973,809, mined at 6:46 a.m. ET on October 30, not one of the 19 had spent a coin. CoinDesk ran the same trace first and put the haul at about $1.4 billion. Binance’s hot wallet was down to 0.37 bitcoin at that block.

Tether and Circle froze stablecoins within hours because they run the contracts. Nobody runs bitcoin’s. Those 19 addresses obey the same rules as yours, and anyone can watch them. The only places the coins can be stopped are the exchanges, desks and swap services they have to touch to turn into something else, and every one of those can see the same 19 addresses we can.

Each of the 11 transfers carried a valid signature. Binance says no private key leaked and that an attacker got into the service that submits withdrawals. Both can be true. The network checks that a signature is valid, not that the person behind it meant it. Binance says updated proof of reserves will come after remediation. This part of the hole is already public, down to the satoshi. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $76,592.