Binance’s October 2025 disruption: the early account

What really happened on October 11, 2025? #Binance black box moment?

In the early hours of October 11 (Beijing time), the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, turned from the deepest liquidity venue into the epicenter of a meltdown.

Within less than two hours, more than 19 billion USD in positions were wiped out across the market. Prices on Binance crashed far beyond any other exchange. ATOM fell to 0.001 USD, DOGE, XRP, FIL and dozens of others collapsed while prices elsewhere barely moved.

@GammaPure (812.eth), who lost almost four million USD, released internal logs that document a systemic failure inside Binance’s matching and risk engine. Together with his market-maker colleague “C,” he reconstructed the entire event minute by minute.
According to their data, between 05:12 and 07:02 UTC +8, all attempts to reduce exposure through so-called “ReduceOnly” or “Close” orders were rejected. The bots received hundreds of API errors — codes -2010, -2022, -4118, 503 and -1008 — which indicate that Binance’s infrastructure and business logic both failed at the same time.

These were not speculative trades. ReduceOnly orders are risk-control commands meant to close existing positions during high volatility. They should always be prioritized by the system. Instead, Binance’s matching engine blocked them completely. Traders were trapped in open positions as prices crashed.

At the same time, professional market makers who normally stabilize prices were unable to enter bids. The buy-side of the order book vanished. Binance, the exchange with the deepest liquidity on earth, suddenly had no functional market. That is why prices on Binance dropped far below all other venues.

Because Binance prices serve as the reference for index and mark prices across the derivatives ecosystem, the anomaly spread instantly. Funding rates, liquidation thresholds, and cross-exchange triggers all reacted to Binance’s distorted data. What began as a technical blockage on one platform became a chain reaction of forced liquidations worldwide.

The traders’ logs show a complete failure of the “safety net” for 106 minutes. Binance’s own documentation promises priority execution for ReduceOnly orders under congestion, but that rule was not followed. The company later admitted to “technical glitches” and de-peg events in assets like USDe, wBETH and BNSOL, compensating users with around 283 million USD. It insists, however, that its core matching engine “remained operational” and that only “10 percent of orders” were affected. Binance has provided no audit logs or data to support this claim.

The difference between a 10 percent rejection rate and the 100 percent shown in user logs is the heart of the scandal. It decides whether this was a normal stress event or a fundamental infrastructure breakdown.

For the affected traders, it was not market risk. They followed the rules, executed their protection mechanisms, and were blocked by the platform itself. The event exposed structural weaknesses in Binance’s Portfolio Margin system, which still requires manual closure of all positions and lacks full API integration. It also revealed that Binance, as the dominant price source for global crypto, can turn a local fault into a global crisis within minutes.

To this day, Binance has not released a detailed timeline, a technical audit, or a transparent explanation of why the risk-control channels failed.

The company’s silence leaves one conclusion: on October 11, 2025, millions lost money not because of bad trades, but because the largest exchange in crypto froze exactly when it was supposed to protect them.

But why? Where is the money?