This morning, Binance announced a $1 billion Bitcoin purchase ($BTC) from the SAFU Fund. Unfortunately, swaps from stablecoin reserves did little to restore confidence following the catastrophic liquidations that occurred on exchanges during the October 10, 2025 crypto crash.
That day, Donald Trump threatened China with unprecedented 100% import tariffs. Investors naturally panicked.
As a result, $BTC Small digital assets suffered an even worse decline. At the worst moment, the native coin of the Cosmos blockchain was trading down 99.99% on Binance.
Rumors (unconfirmed by Binance) were circulating that the exchange or one of CZ's funds intervened during the panic by secretly putting in its own funds to buy unfairly cheap coins.
True or not, skeptics are still unconvinced that Binance has healed the market since the incident three months ago, and are using today's news to reiterate their complaints.
At the time of writing, the price is $83,000. $BTC is down 32% from $122,000 on October 10th. The asset also saw $80 billion worth of trading volume in the past 24 hours, further raising questions about whether Binance's $1 billion acquisition will have a meaningful impact.
Cryptocurrency market has not recovered since October 10th
Two days after the October 10 incident, a viral post by ElonTrades held Binance primarily responsible for $19 billion worth of liquidations.
Skeptics questioned Binance's oracle design flaws and the USDE stablecoin's cross-margin, unified account issues.
On that day, strangely low prices for many assets existed only on Binance. Moreover, Binance partially tacitly acknowledged its unique role in the collapse of certain trading pairs by paying hundreds of millions of dollars in damages while disclaiming any actual responsibility in the same blog post.
Read more: Mapping the Binance empire around the world
Specifically, Binance paid $283 million to “depeg-affected futures, margin, and loan users who held USDE, BNSOL, and WBETH as collateral.”
The company also promised $100 million in low-interest loans and $300 million in Rewards Hub vouchers to “eligible users who lost at least $50 in forced liquidations.”
Additionally, Binance paid an additional $45 million to BNB meme coin investors who lost money.
Lawyers, unimpressed by these payments after $19 billion worth of industry-wide liquidations and market value losses of up to $600 billion during the worst of times, quickly encouraged victims to join class action lawsuits.
The head of OKX said that Binance's damage from October 10th is “real and permanent.”
