BINANCE’S USER FUND BITCOIN WENT TO THE WITHDRAWAL WALLET — 7,500 BTC IN ONE TRANSACTION AT BLOCK 974,354 — NO REFILL DATE
At 05:56 UTC on November 3, 2026, in block 974,354, one transaction sent 7,499.99999322 bitcoin from 165EurvYDfNNYFQCtdT6LEPJrCeX3SMmee to bc1qhp7n555hk5mxlp3pz0347nzah8gazwe7wp5fjj. Those are the coins that left Binance’s user protection fund, SAFU, on October 31. The address that got them is the new bitcoin hot wallet on Binance’s own reserve list, the one that has paid out customer withdrawals since November 1.
Binance described this deployment as a purchase. Its October 31 update said, “We are utilizing part of the SAFU fund to acquire the remaining 10% of outstanding assets.” The chain doesn’t show a purchase. It shows coins that sat for three days under one key, then landed in a wallet with other money in it. By block 974,385 that wallet had sent 2,344.57 bitcoin in 3,385 payments and taken in 1,885.31 from elsewhere. Bitcoin doesn’t label which coin paid whom, so I can’t say the fund’s coins reached customers. I can say they aren’t set apart any more.
The SAFU address itself, 1BAuq7Vho2CEkVkUxbfU26LhwQjbCmWQkD, still holds 7,500.00136678 bitcoin, which CoinDesk valued at about $580 million. Binance wrote in February, quoted by The Block, “If the fund’s market value falls below $800 million due to BTC price fluctuations, Binance will rebalance the fund to restore its value to $1 billion.” CoinDesk points out the rule doesn’t cover the fund being spent, and reports that Binance pledged to restore it to about $1 billion and gave no timeline.
The same October 31 update said the fund “is held and managed by Nest Clearing and Custody Limited,” a clearing house regulated in Abu Dhabi. Nobody has said what say Nest has over coins in a withdrawal wallet. The promise to customers was a pile of bitcoin kept apart for the bad day. The bad day came, and half the pile now sits in the same pool as everything else. Binance says it will refill. Until it names a date, that half is a promise. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $77,507.