Bitcoin has survived several major hacks, often seeing its value drop, then setting off on a run that often ended in new all-time highs.
The crypto space is still reeling from its biggest hack ever, which saw well over $6 billion worth of crypto drained from Binance, although about $3 billion of that is reported to have been frozen.
The incident affected Bitcoin, which dipped to $76,350 for the first time since mid-September before recovering by a couple of grand. But now, a historical comparison shared by CryptosRus shows that BTC rallied to new all-time highs after several major security failures, leading to the question: will the same happen again this time?
Bitcoin’s History After Major Crypto Hacks
In an October 30 post on X, CryptosRus noted that following the Mt. Gox incident in 2014, the price of Bitcoin initially fell by half but soon embarked on a run that saw it increase a hundredfold by 2017.
Another incident, which happened roughly two years after Mt. Gox, saw nearly 120,000 BTC, valued at about $72 million at the time, stolen from Bitfinex, triggering a 20% dip in the OG cryptocurrency’s value. But as CryptosRus pointed out, it hit a new all-time high near $20,000 almost a year later.
It didn’t stop there. In January 2018, Coincheck, a Japanese crypto exchange, suffered the biggest crypto hack by dollar value at the time, when it lost 523 million NEM tokens valued at about $532 million. Although BTC was not the primary asset stolen, it was still affected, bottoming at around $3,100. But by 2021, it had recorded a new ATH near $69,000.
In the midst of that run to $69K, Binance experienced a major breach where hackers stole over 7,000 BTC worth as much as $41 million on May 7, 2019. Yet again, the asset showed resilience, jumping 136% in just 7 weeks.
While not a hack, CryptosRus included the FTX collapse in 2022, which saw Bitcoin plunge by 22%, before setting off on a run that saw its value skyrocket by about 375%, culminating in a new all-time high just shy of $74,000 in March 2024.
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In early 2025, with Bitcoin hitting new highs fueled by the post-US election rally and huge spot ETF flows, Bybit fell victim to a $1.5 billion theft attributed to the Pyongyang-linked Lazarus Group and its affiliate TraderTraitor (which some security experts are blaming for the new Binance heist). In the aftermath of the attack, BTC’s price fell by 24%, but barely three months later, it reached a new record high.
“Bitcoin has survived every one of them,” wrote CryptosRus.
What We Know About the Binance Hack
According to Binance, the $6.3 billion hack may have involved a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop that let an attacker reach a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawals. It says it hasn’t found any evidence of a private key leak and that all losses will be covered by its SAFU fund and company money.
Meanwhile, on-chain data shared by CryptoQuant’s Julio Moreno shows that about $3.7 billion of the stolen funds went to one receiver address on Ethereum. Tether and Circle froze $2.2 billion in stablecoins, but that was after the attacker had already sold about $435 million of USDT for ETH through four swap venues.
Per Moreno’s data, the attacker still has around 462,600 ETH, worth about $1.04 billion, under their control, in addition to another $400 million in assorted tokens that they are selling into decentralized pools. According to him, nothing has so far reached a centralized exchange, bridge, or mixer.
As far as Bitcoin is concerned, the thief moved 18,270 BTC valued at about $1.42 billion from Binance’s cold wallet through one staging address and into 19 new ones, with 17 of them holding exactly 1,000 BTC. At the time of writing, the asset had gone back up to just over $78,000, which still represented a drop of over 2% in 24 hours and 6% over 30 days.
