《Was the October 11 Crash a Targeted Attack?》

These past few days, while writing my posts about liquidations, this question has been on my mind: given the sheer scale of this liquidation event — who was the biggest winner, and how much did they actually make?

Today, @yq_acc’s excellent post, which lays out a detailed timeline, helped me piece things together again.
After chatting with him, I realized that there are indeed many coincidences stacking up — enough to make this crash look increasingly like a carefully orchestrated targeted attack.
And we’ve seen this kind of thing before — during the LUNA collapse.

🎯 When systemic risk piles up, all it takes is one small push in the right weak spot.

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🌴 Three Triggers of the Crash: USDe, wBETH, and BnSOL

The main detonators were USDe, wBETH, and BnSOL.

The last two used spot price oracles, but for illiquid assets, spot prices can be easily manipulated. @binance had already detected the risk and announced plans to update the oracles on the 14th (later moved up to the 11th).

The attack happened right before the oracle update — exploiting this temporary vulnerability and causing the second wave of the crash.

🌴 How the Attack Started

It began with USDe. Around 5:43 AM, a $60M spot dump hit the market in an instant.

The attacker must have accumulated a large amount of USDe beforehand, then unloaded it all at once.

USDe’s liquidity wasn’t deep enough to absorb that — and it depegged.

At 5:44 AM, USDe dropped to $0.89.
Positions using USDe as collateral saw their margin ratios plummet, triggering margin calls.

Because Binance’s unified margin system allows cross-asset collateral, this led to forced liquidations of wBETH and BnSOL positions.
Since both were extremely illiquid (wBETH’s average daily depth was only ~2,000 ETH), their spot prices depegged by more than 20%.

But Binance’s oracle was still using those manipulated spot prices, making collateral value collapse — leading to cascading liquidations.

Then came the recursive liquidation loop (BN’s servers even froze temporarily due to traffic spikes):
Users running yield-loop strategies —
staking ETH/SOL → minting wBETH/BnSOL → borrowing USDT → swapping for USDe —

were completely wiped out.

When USDe depegged, their collateral ratios fell below 91%, triggering auto-liquidations across all assets and further sell pressure on wBETH/BnSOL.

At the peak of chaos:
USDe dropped to $0.65
wBETH fell to $430
BnSOL crashed to $34.90

🌴 Why I Suspect a Targeted Attack
Coincidence #1:

The attack occurred right before Binance’s scheduled oracle fix for wBETH and BnSOL.

Coincidence #2:

The attacker instantly dumped $60M USDe, seemingly ignoring slippage losses — which is extremely unusual behavior.

🌴Frankly, these kinds of oracle manipulation → chain liquidation → profit extraction attacks happened many times during DeFi Summer.

But this time, Binance’s sheer scale meant no flash loans could easily amplify the effect.
So the attacker likely needed significant preparation and capital to pull it off.

🌴 Estimated Profit of the Attacker

Based on @yq_acc’s estimates — which align closely with my earlier post:

Potential short profits: $300-400 million

Asset accumulation at distressed prices: $400-600 million opportunity

Cross-exchange arbitrage: $100-200 million

Total potential extraction: $800 million - $1.2 billion

This might be the most profitable coordinated attack in recent crypto history.

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🌴 Can Binance Trace the Attacker?

If Binance wants to, they could potentially trace the attacker through KYC data — unless fake identities were used.

But morally speaking, this might not qualify as “criminal.”

The attacker simply exploited a rule-based vulnerability, tossing one snowball that triggered one of the biggest avalanches in crypto history.

Can it be prosecuted? Hard to say.

🌴 Final Thoughts

I’d suggest @cz_binance, @heyibinance, and @binance investigate whether this theory holds up.

Also, check out @yq_acc’s original post — it’s an excellent timeline breakdown.

He even mapped the MM (market maker) withdrawal moments, explaining why Binance’s spot prices lagged behind other exchanges —
MMs inside Binance took massive hits during the chaos and had to pull out for risk control.
Summary:

Multiple coincidences, perfectly timed oracle vulnerabilities, and huge capital movements suggest the October 11 crash wasn’t random — it may have been a precision-engineered liquidation cascade, leaving the attacker with close to a billion dollars in profit.

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