Binance’s $570M SAFU Bitcoin Just Moved Again to a Mystery Wallet
Key Takeaways
7,500 BTC from Binance’s SAFU reached an unlabeled wallet at 05:56 UTC on Nov. 3, Unchained data shows.The fund’s remaining 7,500 BTC is worth about $572M, below the $800M line in Binance’s refill rule.Binance has pledged to restore SAFU to roughly $1B but has not given a date for the top-up.
A Silent Move That Could Unnerve Investors
Binance’s Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU), the reserve the exchange set up to protect customers in extreme events, is now at half its former size, and the half it spent is on the move. To elaborate, the 7,500 BTC that left the fund on Oct. 31 changed hands again early on Nov. 3.
Binance said on Oct. 31 that a “partial deployment” of SAFU was part of how it would cover losses from the hot-wallet breach, alongside part of its futures insurance fund and its own corporate treasury. It never said how much came from each pot, and the latest movements give the clearest view yet of where that money went.
What the Chain Shows
The coins left Binance’s published SAFU address, 1BAuq7Vho2…, in two transactions on Oct. 31: 1 BTC at 14:45 UTC and 7,499 BTC at 14:51 UTC. They then landed at an intermediate address and sat there for three days.
At 05:56 UTC on Nov. 3, that intermediate address sent all 7,500 BTC in a single transaction to an unlabeled wallet that has processed more than 2,400 transactions over its lifespan. Fifty minutes later, the wallet split the stack into 150 outputs of about 50 BTC each.
Ninety-six of those outputs, totaling 4,800 BTC, were then bundled into a 9,346 BTC transfer. The remaining 54 chunks went out in separate transactions that day.
Breaking a large holding into 50 BTC pieces and recombining some of them is usually how an exchange routes coins to market makers or over-the-counter (OTC) desks to buy back missing tokens. Nothing in the data, however, ties the receiving address to a named entity, and Binance has not explained the transfers.
At bitcoin’s current price of about $77,70, the moved coins are worth well over $572 million.
Why the SAFU Figure Is Important
SAFU held 15,000 BTC in February, after Binance finished converting the roughly $1 billion fund from stablecoins into bitcoin. It now holds just over 7,500 BTC.
That puts the fund below a line Binance drew itself. Its SAFU FAQ clearly states that the exchange will rebalance the fund back to $1 billion if its value “falls below $800 million due to BTC price fluctuations.”
The catch is that the rule covers price drops, not spending and Binance has said separately that it is “committing to replenishing the SAFU to return the fund size to approximately US$1 billion,” but it gave no timeline. Its Nov. 3 incident report, which traced the attack to a tainted developer install and an abused internal wallet service, does not mention SAFU at all.
Binance’s Balance Sheet After the Breach
Binance says it has carried the full cost and replenished 98% of its impacted assets (as of Oct. 31), with less liquid tokens still in the process of being bought. Bitcoin.com News reported that the post-mortem tied the breach to a fake job interview and compromised artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
Customer flows have steadied since withdrawals reopened and Binance posted that by 03:00 UTC on Nov. 3, it was seeing hourly deposits exceed withdrawals, and data also showed $3.22 billion of net inflows over 24 hours against $12.17 billion of net outflows over seven days.
That swing came after a sharp exit, which Bitcoin.com News covered when inflows flipped positive following a $7 billion post-hack exodus.
