727 FinanceTrading Moments: Hackers Push BTC to a Local Low, Testing $75K Support as Asia-Pacific Tech Stocks Rout Across the Board
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we focus on the crypto market, Japan, South Korea, A-shares, and Hong Kong stocks, reviewing the market with data and seizing opportunities with trends, produced by PANews.
The crypto market suffered a security black swan event overnight. Bitcoin plunged intraday from above $80,000 to a low of $76,460, with an intraday amplitude of nearly 5%, and is now oscillating in the $77,000 to $78,000 range. The trigger for this massive shock was the largest security breach in Binance's history, involving an estimated $6.3 billion in assets. Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs and on-chain detective ZachXBT are highly confident that the case was carried out by the North Korean hacker group TraderTraitor, and the market fear index plummeted to 30, the lowest since August.
On the technical level, Bitcoin is under extreme pressure. A well-known trader pointed out that Bitcoin is currently desperately defending the weekly 21 EMA and the 365-day moving average (around $77,000); the core downside defense for bulls lands precisely at the 50-week moving average corresponding to $75,800 and the 200-day moving average around $73,000; on the upside, it is successively blocked at $81,400 and $82,200. Technical analyst Rekt Capital warned that if the weekly candle fails to reclaim $81,400, that level will completely turn into strong medium-term resistance. A weekly close below $78,200 or $76,800 would trigger a new round of bottom-finding, but a true "panic capitulation" has not yet appeared, and BTC at $77,000 still has 64% of upside room from its previous all-time high of $126,000, offering extremely high long-term value.
The derivatives and options markets also shifted rapidly from extreme greed to risk-off pricing, with put option premiums surging sharply, and a huge demand for downside liquidity protection concentrated in the $72,000 to $75,000 strike range. Trader Astronomer emphasized that $75,000 is merely the liquidity target for shorts' primary take-profit, and the true structural bottom may only be confirmed after a retest of the macro range midpoint of $72,000.
Market views diverge on the subsequent impact. Doctor Profit and Nachi believe that the approximately $3 billion in frozen stablecoins will be re-minted and returned, and that Binance, under the premise of fully covering losses with its own funds and the SAFU fund, will in the future have to forcibly buy back approximately $1.4 billion to $3.3 billion in crypto assets on the spot market. The hack will essentially translate into forced net buying, so they firmly maintain a long-term bullish stance; however, Geoffrey Kendrick, head of digital assets at Standard Chartered Bank, warned that the market bottoming is not over until the stolen assets are fully clarified and disposed of.
The core focus of the market right now is the specific timetable for the restoration of Binance's withdrawal channels. If no second run occurs after withdrawals open in the next 48 hours, the lower shadow created by this round of panic will very likely become the ultimate shakeout bottom in the macro trend.
If Bitcoin still has the logical protection of "exchange buybacks to support the market," then Ethereum and altcoins have directly become the hardest-hit areas for hacker money laundering and capital flight. Because Tether and Circle quickly froze more than $2.39 billion in stolen stablecoins, Binance hackers, in order to evade regulation, launched a frantic, cost-no-object on-chain rotation, forcibly converting large amounts of stablecoins and small coins such as UNI and PEPE into ETH that cannot be frozen, briefly buying up the local on-chain ETH price to around $5,000, with single-transaction Gas spiking above $800.
However, this distorted buying quickly turned into heavy selling pressure. Coupled with the gloom of prediction market Polymarket also suspending trading after a $2.6 million hack, Ethereum fell below the key psychological threshold of $2,200, and spot ETFs saw a net outflow of $105 million yesterday. On the technical side, trader Merlijn pointed out that ETH is severely testing the $2,100 to $2,300 support band, with upside resistance at $2,538 and $2,725; a weekly close below $2,100 would slide directly into the $1,850 abyss.
Binance's platform token BNB plunged more than 8% in a single day to around $680. Aave, due to bad-debt risk after hackers used stolen USDT as collateral to borrow ETH, urgently suspended new deposits and borrowings and plummeted 11% to a low of $115. At present, hackers still hold more than $1.1 billion in unfrozen ETH and are laundering it through Tornado Cash, triggering panic selling by large holders.
Yet the darkest hour for CEXs has sounded the clarion call for the rise of DEXs. Geoffrey Kendrick, head of digital assets at Standard Chartered Bank, said the Binance hack will greatly accelerate the migration of funds to DEXs that have never been hacked, which makes him firmly believe that UNI's target price of $100 by 2030 is "perhaps even too low."
The only asset surging against the trend on the board is Hyperliquid, whose token rose about 20% in 24 hours to break above $97, closing in on its all-time high of $97.96. The trigger for the rally was the announcement by Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, that it would invest in Trade[XYZ], backed by Wall Street legendary billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller, planning to launch crypto, equity, and commodity perpetual contracts based on Hyperliquid to U.S. retail investors under a compliant framework. Even Musk could not resist reposting and commenting, "Interesting." In addition, a Dco report pointed out that Hyperliquid is cutting into the global traditional financial market, and if it captures a 3% market share, HYPE's target price by 2029 could reach $128, with an optimistic scenario of $165.
Today's highlights:
LayerZero Labs' DVN and Executor stop providing services to Metis
Balancer liquidity pools cease operation, with pools supporting withdrawals only
Kamino (KMNO) unlocks about 229 million tokens, worth about $9.1 million
Collector Crypt (CARDS) unlocks about 59.26 million tokens, worth about $18.4 million
Upbit 24-hour trading volume ranking: XRP, BTC, ETH, ENA, NEAR
Bitcoin spot ETF: +$17.0719 million, 4 consecutive days of net inflows
Ethereum spot ETF: -$105 million, 4 consecutive days of net outflows
Top gainers among the top 100 coins by market cap today: HYPE +14.1%, ZRO +3.5%, SKY +2.7%, QNT +2.1%, HTX +1.8%.
Affected by losses from AI spending by U.S. tech giants and Intel's poor earnings guidance, Asia-Pacific chip and tech stocks suffered a severe selloff today. South Korea's KOSPI plunged 5.6% intraday and finally closed down 3.53%, as market panic over a slowdown in AI infrastructure intensified. Hit by this, South Korea's two chip giants saw their shares tumble: SK Hynix fell about 7% after Intel warned that AI server demand is squeezing the PC memory market, which could cause the PC market to keep shrinking over the next two years; Samsung Electronics fell about 3% after its third-quarter chip profit missed expectations and it still raised capital expenditure by 60% against the current environment, triggering market concerns about blind capacity expansion.
This tech cold wave also swept through Tokyo and collided with a historic policy turning point from the Bank of Japan, wiping about $160 billion off Japanese stocks in a single day, with the Nikkei 225 closing down 2.12%. Although the Bank of Japan kept its interest rate unchanged at 1.25% today, it announced for the first time in 13 years that inflation had reached the 2% target and sharply raised its annual pace of selling stock ETFs from 330 billion yen to 860 billion yen. Although Governor Kazuo Ueda tried to play down this "inflation victory declaration," and analyst Justin Low also believes that his cautious attitude leaves the question of a December rate hike full of uncertainty, the central bank's accelerated stock selling and the U.S. tech crash resonated, making Japanese electronics stocks the hardest-hit area.
A-shares also could not escape the global tech selloff. More than 4,600 individual stocks fell today, with the Shanghai Composite closing down 1.44% and losing the 3,600 point level, the Shenzhen Component down 2.73%, and the tech-heavy ChiNext Index and STAR 50 plunging 4.13% and 5.48% respectively. The two innovation boards have cumulatively fallen more than 23% this month, and the ChiNext Index has been halved from its June high. Although it was revealed today that AI unicorn DeepSeek completed a second round of financing worth 105.5 billion yuan, attracting state-owned capital and nearly 30 giants including Tencent and CATL as investors, people familiar with the matter said that the doubling of its fundraising was precisely because of Nvidia chip price increases and defense against the AI bubble, which instead confirms the cost crisis in computing hardware.
In Hong Kong stocks, the Hang Seng Index launched a major afternoon counterattack and closed up 1.46% against the trend, while the Hang Seng Tech Index edged up 0.29%. Hong Kong domestic consumption stocks surged across the board: Mao Geping soared more than 13%, Mengniu Dairy jumped nearly 9.5%, Sinopec rose more than 6%, and Pop Mart gained more than 4%. Meanwhile, Hong Kong tech hardware came under simultaneous pressure: Lenovo Group, hit by the PC contraction, plunged more than 7%, GigaDevice fell more than 8%, Hua Hong Semiconductor dropped more than 6%, and Evergrande Property Services, on its first day of resumption of trading, also tumbled more than 17%.