Strive CEO: Bitcoin has outperformed expectations in the wake of the Binance hack, though the market’s bottom has yet to be confirmed.

Strive CEO Matt Cole said that the $6.3 billion Binance hack has not changed his long-term investment judgment on Bitcoin. Given the scale of the attack and overall market weakness, Bitcoin’s decline was smaller than he expected, but it is still too early to determine whether prices have hit a bottom. Currently, Bitcoin trades at around $77,400, down about 4% from before the attack began on Thursday. Strive previously disclosed it held 43,000 BTC as of October 23. Cole compared the wallet attack to a bank robbery, not a failure of the Bitcoin network. Wirex Head of Financial Crime Paul Chapman also emphasized that the attack targeted a company’s systems, not the Bitcoin network itself. On the outlook, Cole believes the market is in an "early spring" recovery phase that may last another 6 to 9 months, with prices rising gradually rather than quickly hitting new highs. He stated the event will not alter his Bitcoin investment logic over any reasonable time horizon. For historical market reactions: after Bybit suffered a $1.5 billion hack in 2025, combined with overall market volatility, Bitcoin fell from near $100,000 to around $95,000, a roughly 5% drop. Separately, CNBC cited Anchorage Digital data showing that on average, Bitcoin has dropped 8.3% in the first 24 hours after past crypto exchange hacks. The attack investigation is ongoing. Blockaid CEO Ido Ben-Natan thinks the attacker may have exploited Binance’s transaction signing process; his analysis found an Ethereum transaction with 50 signature authorizations, where matching permissions allowed attacker-controlled code to execute via the wallet. Binance said as of Friday, no evidence of wallet private key leaks has been found.