The 7,500 BTC that moved out of Binance‘s Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) on Oct. 31 moved again early on Nov. 3, according to Unchained’s pull of public blockchain data. The fund’s remaining 7,500 BTC is half the 15,000 BTC it held after the exchange converted the fund in February.
Binance said on Oct. 31 that a “partial deployment” of SAFU was part of how it was covering losses from the roughly $6.3 billion hot-wallet hack, alongside part of its Futures insurance fund and its own corporate treasury. It did not say how much came from each. CoinDesk reported the drawdown on Nov. 3.
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What the Chain Shows
At 05:56 UTC on Nov. 3, the intermediate address that had received SAFU’s outgoing bitcoin sent all 7,500 BTC in one transaction to an unlabeled address that has handled heavy volume: more than 2,400 transactions over its life. TechFlow reported the transfer earlier on Nov. 3. At 06:46 UTC, that address split the coins into 150 outputs of about 50 BTC each. Ninety-six of those outputs, 4,800 BTC, were among the inputs to a 9,346 BTC transfer it made to another address at 14:53 UTC; the other 54 each went into separate transactions that day, with 15 to 41 outputs.
Those coins reached the intermediate address on Oct. 31 from the SAFU bitcoin address Binance publishes, 1BAuq7Vho2CEkVkUxbfU26LhwQjbCmWQkD, in two transactions: 1 BTC at 14:45 UTC and 7,499 BTC at 14:51 UTC. The SAFU address had taken in 15,000 BTC across five deposits from Feb. 2 to Feb. 12, and it has received only dust since the Oct. 31 transfers. It held just over 7,500 BTC at 20:53 UTC on Nov. 3, or about $583 million at mempool.space’s 20:40 UTC price of $77,798.
The Refill Rule
Binance wrote in its SAFU FAQ that it will rebalance the fund back to $1 billion if its value “falls below US$800 million due to BTC price fluctuations.” At $77,798, $800 million equals about 10,283 BTC.
In its Oct. 31 update, Binance separately said it “is committing to replenishing the SAFU to return the fund size to approximately US$1 billion.” It gave no date. Binance’s Nov. 3 incident report, which traced the attack to a tainted developer install, does not mention SAFU.
Flows on Nov. 3
Binance posted on Nov. 3 that “by 03:00 UTC, we are seeing hourly deposits exceed withdrawals.” It said a second phase of withdrawals would begin at 04:00 UTC that day, after the exchange restarted withdrawals on Nov. 1.
DefiLlama data pulled by Unchained at 20:45 UTC on Nov. 3 showed $3.22 billion of net inflows to Binance over 24 hours, against net outflows of $12.17 billion over seven days. Binance also published a zero-knowledge proof of reserves for BTC, ETH and eight other tokens on Nov. 2.
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