Charting shows USDe on Binance didn’t depeg until about 20 minutes after the crash — after the Hyperliquid "insider" shorts had closed — so the attack-and-profit narratives don’t add up.
Around $60–90M of USDe was sold on Binance, alongside wBETH and BNSOL, exploiting a pricing approach that used Binance’s own order-book prices for collateral instead of external oracles.
That Binance-only depeg prompted roughly $500M–$1B in forced liquidations on the exchange, cascaded into $19B+ globally, and the attackers reportedly earned about $192M via $1.1B in BTC/ETH shorts opened on Hyperliquid hours earlier, minutes before a tariff headline.
Binance’s Unified Account allowed assets like USDe, wBETH, and BNSOL as collateral and marked them to the exchange’s spot order book rather than oracle or redemption prices. A fix to move to oracle pricing was announced on Oct 6 but not fully rolled out until Oct 14, leaving an eight-day window.
During that window, actors manipulated Binance order books, dumping ~$60–90M of USDe and pushing its Binance price to about $0.65 while it remained near $1 elsewhere. Because collateral was marked to internal prices, margin values collapsed and $500M–$1B of forced liquidations occurred. A tariff headline then amplified panic and liquidity stress.
New wallets on Hyperliquid opened $1.1B in BTC/ETH shorts funded by about $110M USDC from Arbitrum-linked sources. As the Binance cascade unfolded and BTC/ETH fell, those shorts netted roughly $192M before closing, with timing and funding paths suggesting coordination.
4️⃣ The Contagion
Binance liquidations dumped BTC/ETH/altcoins into thin books, cross-market bots and hedging forced unwinds on other venues, producing $19B+ in global liquidations and large intraday losses for many alts.
Binance’s pricing design and delayed oracle rollout are identified as the root cause; manipulators executed the moves and profited via external shorts; Ethena (USDe) reportedly remained 1:1 collateralized and redeemed normally elsewhere.
Binance acknowledged platform-related issues, proposed compensation for affected users, and implemented minimum price floors plus oracle integration. USDe stayed operational, and the incident is now cited as an example of how exchange-side pricing errors can trigger system-wide liquidations.
Bottom line: A sub-$100M manipulation on Binance plus a $1.1B leveraged short elsewhere set off a $19B market collapse — a failure of exchange collateral valuation under macro stress, not a stablecoin breakdown.
Charting shows USDe on Binance didn’t depeg until about 20 minutes after the crash — after the Hyperliquid "insider" shorts had closed — so the attack-and-profit narratives don’t add up.
apparently it was trump calling for 100% tariifs on China