The sharp decline in Bitcoin and altcoins on Friday night was thought to have begun after US President Donald Trump announced steep tariffs on China. However, recent allegations suggest that the move may actually have been an orchestrated attack on Binance.
Many trading pairs on Binance experienced abnormally deep price declines compared to other exchanges. This is considered a technically challenging anomaly. An attacker allegedly exploited vulnerabilities in the BNSOL/WBETH price oracle and overleveraged positions in the USDe stablecoin, simultaneously opening a large short position on the Hyperliquid exchange.
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) shared the following on the subject: “I'm not sure about its validity. I hope someone can verify it.”
According to research shared within the crypto community, a mysterious figure known as the Hyperliquid/Hyperunit whale is behind this attack. This individual is reportedly holding over 100,000 BTC and recently sold $4.23 billion worth of BTC to acquire ETH. It's also alleged that the same address, believed to be the same individual, also opened a massive $735 million Bitcoin short position.
On-chain data revealed that the individual was associated with the Ethereum address ereignis.eth, which used garrettjin.eth as its alias. This information focused investigators' attention on Garrett Jin.
When Garrett Jin’s background is examined, it is seen that he founded a company called Da Yo Trading (HK) in 2012, served as the Director of Operations at the Huobi (HTX) stock exchange until 2015, and later started a venture called FuLang Medical GmbH in Germany.
Most notably, Jin served as CEO of the BitForex exchange between 2017 and 2020. BitForex was in the news due to accusations of volume manipulation and suffered a $57 million loss when its hot wallets were hacked in 2024. Following the incident, the exchange became inaccessible, user funds were frozen, and company employees were reportedly detained by Chinese authorities.
According to research, the Bitcoin addresses used by the whale in question are linked to funds withdrawn from HTX, OKX, ViaBTC, Bixin, and Binance exchanges 7-8 years ago. This reinforces suspicions that funds linked to BitForex and Huobi are being re-moved.
Garrett Jin is also reportedly the founder of the institutional staking platform XHash, which some analysts have claimed could “legitimize funds from questionable sources.”
While the allegations remain unconfirmed, the coordinated sell-off in the crypto market that began just before Trump’s statement and the price anomalies on Binance suggest the incident may have been much more than just a market reaction.
*This is not investment advice.
