The sharp decline in Bitcoin and altcoins on Friday night is believed to have started after US President Donald Trump announced increased tariffs on China. However, recent allegations suggest that this move may actually have been a coordinated attack on Binance.
Many trading pairs on Binance experienced unusually large price declines compared to other exchanges. This is considered a technically difficult anomaly. The attackers reportedly exploited a vulnerability in the BNSOL/WBETH price oracle to overleverage positions in the USDe stablecoin while simultaneously opening large short positions on the Hyperliquid exchange.
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) said of this, “I'm not sure about its validity. I hope someone will verify it.”
Research shared within the cryptocurrency community reveals that a mysterious figure known as the Hyperliquid/Hyperunit whale is behind this attack. The individual reportedly holds over 100,000 BTC and recently sold $4.23 billion worth of BTC to acquire ETH. It is also said that the same person, believed to be at the same address, opened a huge short position in Bitcoin worth $735 million.
On-chain data reveals that this individual is associated with the Ethereum address ereignis.eth, which uses garrettjin.eth as an alias. This information focused investigators' attention on Garrett Zinn.
A look into Garrett Jin's career reveals that he founded a company called Da Yo Trading (HK) in 2012, served as the operations director of the Huobi (HTX) stock exchange until 2015, and then started a venture company in Germany called FuLang Medical GmbH.
Most notably, Jin served as CEO of BitForex exchange from 2017 to 2020. BitForex was in the news for accusations of volume manipulation and suffered a loss of $57 million when its hot wallet was hacked in 2024. Following the incident, the exchange was reportedly inaccessible, users' funds were frozen, and the company's employees were detained by Chinese authorities.
According to the investigation, the Bitcoin addresses used by the whales in question are associated with funds withdrawn from HTX, OKX, ViaBTC, Bixin, and Binance exchanges seven to eight years ago. This strengthens suspicions that funds related to BitForex and Huobi are being relocated.
Garrett Zinn is also reportedly the founder of the institutional staking platform XHash, which some analysts claim “could legitimize funds from questionable sources.”
Although this suspicion remains unconfirmed, the coordinated sell-off in the cryptocurrency market and Binance's price anomaly that began just before President Trump's statement suggests that the incident may have been more than just a market reaction.
*This is not investment advice.
