Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, has paid out $283 million in compensation following a sharp market downturn that briefly caused several of its assets to lose their peg.
The event unfolded on Friday, when volatility in the crypto markets led to temporary price dislocations in three Binance Earn products — Ethena’s stablecoin USDe, Binance’s Solana-based liquid staking token BNSOL, and WBETH, a wrapped version of the exchange’s own Beacon staking token.
Due to significant market fluctuations over the past 16 hours and a substantial influx of users, some users have encountered issues with their transactions. I deeply apologize for this. If you have incurred losses attributable to Binance, please contact our customer service to… https://t.co/9Q7GZuFY5H
— Yi He (@heyibinance) October 11, 2025
According to Binance, the compensation covers users who held these assets as collateral in futures, margin, or loan positions and suffered losses between 21:36 and 22:16 UTC on October 10. Users affected by internal transfers or Earn redemptions during that period were also included.
USDe, which is designed to maintain a one-to-one peg with the U.S. dollar, briefly plunged to around $0.66 on Binance before recovering. Notably, the same level of volatility was not seen on other exchanges.
Ethena Labs co-founder and CEO Guy Young responded on X (formerly Twitter), saying it was inaccurate to label the event a true “USDe depeg,” noting that liquidity pools elsewhere remained stable.
On events of last Friday to be absolutely clear:
— G | Ethena (@gdog97_) October 12, 2025
i) Ethena's mint and redeem function had zero downtime and was processing the largest number of withdrawals in its lifetime - more than $1b in a few hours and $2b in a 24hr period with zero issues.
ii) Primary liquidity venues…
Binance emphasized that the market crash occurred before the depegging incident and pushed back against speculation that an attack on the platform had triggered the market turbulence.
“Records show that during the market sell-off, prices fell to their lowest point between 21:20 and 21:21 UTC,” Binance stated. “The severe de-pegging occurred after 21:36 UTC.”
To prevent similar incidents, Binance said it would update its systems to include asset redemption prices in index weightings and introduce a soft price floor for USDe in its reference index. These measures aim to stabilize price movements and improve the resilience of Binance Earn products.
The exchange also addressed separate price anomalies in tokens like IOTX and ATOM, which briefly showed dramatic drops — ATOM, for instance, reportedly fell below $0.01 before rebounding to around $3.50. Binance attributed the glitch to old limit orders dating back as far as 2019 that were triggered during the sell-off amid low liquidity. The IOTX/USDT pair even showed a value of $0 due to a decimal display error, which the exchange says it will fix.
Someone bought $ATOM on Binance at $0.001
— AlΞx Wacy 🌐 (@wacy_time1) October 10, 2025
And made +284,900% profit in minutes pic.twitter.com/WuTuYupb7h
Despite the turmoil, markets have since bounced back. Binance’s native token BNB rose 11.8% over the past 24 hours, and GM30 Index, which tracks the 30 largest cryptocurrencies, climbed 6.8% over the same period.
Binance noted that it is still reviewing user cases and may distribute additional compensation. The exchange reiterated its commitment to protecting users and strengthening safeguards to prevent similar disruptions in the future.
