The crypto market is crashing on Thursday night, and the trigger is Binance. At 20:24 UTC a hot wallet of the world’s largest crypto exchange was drained in a single transaction, with roughly $2.8 billion leaving on Ethereum. Within the next hour Bitcoin slid from $80,327 to $78,763, BNB lost up to 6.3%, and about $628 million in leveraged positions were force-closed in one hour. Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao says it “does look like a hack”, while Binance itself says it is investigating reports of a potential security issue. Tether and Circle have frozen around $2.4 billion in stablecoins.

The technical details of the drained wallet are in our Binance hack report. This article is about the market: who sold when, which coins fell…