Binance reopened and 16,500 BTC left in under eight hours. So far it looks like a queue, not a run

Binance reopened bitcoin withdrawals at about 06:20 UTC on Sunday. By 14:00 UTC the wallets it lists had lost 16,500 BTC, 2.6% of what they held, and our node had counted 20,700 separate payouts along the way. That reads like a rush for the exit. Set against a normal week, it reads more like a queue.

Those wallets had paid out nothing for 57 hours, since the evening of Thursday's hack. In the week before the hack, 22 to 28 October, the same 72 addresses made about 8,630 payouts a day and moved about 4,775 BTC. So 57 shut hours leave a backlog of about 20,500 payouts and 11,300 BTC. Today's count has matched that in under eight hours. The coins have run heavier, about 1.4 times the backlog, or twice it against the quieter same days a week earlier, and the average payout is 0.76 BTC against the usual 0.55 BTC. It still isn't what a run looks like, and this chart has a real one to compare it with.

Hour by hour

The first hour took more than a third of the coins, and 5,195 BTC of it went out in payouts of 10 BTC or more, so the biggest customers were at the front. The count has since settled at about 2,000 an hour. That's still nearly six times normal, so the queue isn't finished, though Binance's own batching may set some of that pace.

Who was in it

The typical payout was 0.0076 BTC, about $600. Nothing reached 1,000 BTC, and the largest was 505 BTC. The 213 payouts of 10 BTC or more carried 75% of the coins, which sounds top-heavy but is normal here. They carried 82% in the week before the hack, and that week's pace gives about 200 of them in 57 hours. Big holders aren't fleeing out of proportion to everyone else.

What a real run looks like

We have one in the same series. In the scare of December 2022, Binance's listed BTC fell from 437,230 BTC on 11 December to 374,024 BTC on 15 December, down 14.5%. The worst 24 hours took 43,199 BTC, 10.1% of the balance, and the hourly pace kept climbing for more than a day before peaking at 4,848 BTC. Today's fall is 2.6%, and its biggest hour came right at the start, which is when a backlog clears.

Two things stop us calling it over. These wallets aren't taking coins in: they normally receive about 6,500 BTC a day, and since midnight they've received 500 BTC, which was Binance funding its own new wallet. Deposits may simply not be swept there yet, but until they are, this line can only fall. And it's early. Across all exchanges our outflow count (Plus) has reached 19,472 BTC with the day still open, against a 30-day average of 8,283 BTC.

Where the coins went

More than half, 8,903 BTC, hadn't moved again by our cut. Our free proof of reserves page showed Binance down $2.09B over 24 hours at 10:00 UTC, with OKX up $134M and Bybit up $227M, which suggests some of this is money changing venue.

What to watch

• Payouts an hour. Normal is about 360. When the count gets back near that, the queue has gone.
• Coins coming back. Deposits reaching the listed wallets again would be the first sign the shock has passed.
• The full proof. Binance's 31 October snapshot says customers held 692,187 BTC and it held 692,489 BTC, and reports put the full proof on Tuesday. Our node counted 645,043 BTC at its listed wallets then, 93.2% of the customer figure. That gap isn't a shortfall by itself: the stated figure also counts bitcoin held as tokens on other networks and 10,824 BTC with a custodian, which a list of Bitcoin addresses can't show.
• Ether. Ether withdrawals followed at about 07:49 UTC. Binance's listed ETH fell 66,666 ETH, 2.3%, by 10:00 UTC, the latest hour we have.

How we measure it

Everything here comes from our own Bitcoin node. We took every transaction since 03:00 UTC on Sunday that spends from an address Binance lists, and any output that doesn't go back to a listed address counts as a payout. Today and the baseline week use the same 72 addresses, and our sum matches the node-versus-statement chart (Plus) to within 0.001 BTC.

The count starts at block 974,089, the first withdrawal batch. Before it, about 1,200 BTC moved in a few transfers, and 500 BTC of that went straight into the wallet Binance added to its list at 06:22 UTC, which is why the chart's fall is a little bigger than the payouts. A transfer to a wallet Binance hasn't listed yet would count as a payout here. We look at organisations only and follow no customer. The balance chart is free at daily resolution, and our guide to reading exchange balances explains the rest.