Oct 30, 2026
Binance hack: how one trader made about $3.47M from an ETH price gap
Binance's hacker panic-bought ETH, pushing DEX prices 15-30% above Aave's price feed for about an hour. One address borrowed ETH on Aave, sold it high and bought it back lower for about $3.47M before gas, per on-chain analysts.
Sir Toastimir
Illustration · Sources: on-chain analysis via Odaily, Bitquery
Not financial advice. Figures come from on-chain analysis and are before gas fees; they have not been independently audited. This is not a recommendation to trade.
Binance's hack created a short-lived price gap on Ethereum, and one trader turned it into about $3.47 million in under two hours, according to an on-chain analysis reported by Odaily and other crypto outlets. Not financial advice: this explains what happened, it is not a strategy to copy.
Why the price gap appeared
Stablecoins like USDT can be frozen by their issuer. To get ahead of freezes, the attacker rushed to swap stolen stablecoins into ETH on decentralized exchanges (DEXs). Those big, hurried buys pushed ETH in some DEX pools to about $2,560 to $2,750, with Bitquery measuring Uniswap's main pool up to 38% above the wider market. Meanwhile Aave, a crypto lending app, kept valuing ETH at about $2,250 to $2,290 through its Chainlink price feed, which follows the broad market. The gap lasted close to an hour.
The method, in four steps
- 1. Deposit: put stablecoins (USDC or USDT) into Aave as collateral, like a pawn-shop deposit.
- 2. Borrow: borrow ETH against it. Aave values that ETH at the normal price.
- 3. Sell high: sell the borrowed ETH on a DEX where it was overpriced. The top address sold 12,289 ETH at an average of about $2,580.
- 4. Buy back and repay: after prices fell back, buy ETH again and repay the loan. The same address bought 12,314 ETH at about $2,297.
The difference was about $3.47 million before gas fees. Woofun reports the trader used roughly $37 million of collateral. In total, 61 addresses (excluding the hacker) borrowed ETH on Aave in the six hours after the incident, and the top ten earned about $6.36 million combined.
Why it is not a bug, and why it is gone
Analysts say Aave's contracts had no vulnerability; the trade used a temporary gap between two prices. The window closed as DEX prices fell back and Aave froze its main V3 market. Bitquery estimates the hacker overpaid about $119 million through rushed swaps, and that traders and bots kept about $60 million.
Smart trade, or profiting off a hack?
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