BNB, the original symbol of Binance’s ecosystem, climbed to an all-time high of $1,355 after a turbulent weekend that saw $20 billion wiped from the broader crypto market.
Data from CryptoSlate showed that BNB rose 17% in 24 hours, outperforming other top ten cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization.
The rally came even as President Donald Trump’s Oct. 10 tariffs on China prompted panic selling of risk assets, including digital currencies. Bitcoin has failed to provide similar strength and is $10,000 below its recent all-time high.
BNB’s strong price recovery thus reflected renewed confidence in Binance’s ecosystem, despite the exchange’s recent operational issues.
Binance will pay $283 million in compensation
Over the weekend, Binance was strong criticism for the way the platform handles the extreme price swings that disrupted trading activity.
Many of the exchange users complained from flash crashes that took several tokens to near-zero levels and frozen accounts that prevented them from closing or hedging their market positions.
These disruptions increased frustration among traders, who argued that Binance’s dominant position in global trading volume meant the company should have been more resilient to market turbulence.
In response, Binance announced it had distributed $283 million in compensation to users affected by severe price disruptions for several products, including USDE, BNSOL and wBETH.
The exchange attributed the losses to intense volatility and temporary glitches in the collateral and pricing modules.
Binance said it has refunded affected users and promised to expand redress for transfer delays and refunds.
Meanwhile, on-chain analysts speculated that the disruptions could have been caused by a coordinated exploit targeting Binance’s unified margin system.
Martin Hiesboeck, head of research at Uphold, said the outage exposed a structural weakness: liquidation prices were primarily sourced from Binance’s own volatile spot feed rather than aggregated market data. As a result, the value of collateral fell faster, prompting forced liquidations that further exacerbated the decline.
Hiesboeck noted that the incident occurred between a scheduled software patch and its implementation, creating a vulnerability window that may have caused $500 million to $1 billion in cumulative losses.
He warned that the situation reflected systemic risk events such as the Terra collapse and emphasized that centralized risk models remain vulnerable during extreme volatility.
Binance defends the system
Binance, however, rejected the idea of a targeted exploit, insisting that its core spot and futures engines functioned normally during the unrest.
The company said an internal investigation found that forced liquidations accounted for only a small portion of trading volume, suggesting the broader market shock, rather than an internal error, caused the sell-off.
The exchange also clarified that short price drops in tokens such as IOTX and ATOM were due to long-term limit orders. It added that the “low price” values of some user dashboards were more likely to be display errors than executed transactions.
Binance co-founder He Yi too called the circulating ‘FUD’ attack theories, which claim that Binance’s matching engines and settlement systems ‘remained stable throughout the event’.