Historical replay · CRCLB/USD
Circle Froze $823M of Hacked USDC and Fell 11% (October 2026)
Tokenised Circle fell 11% from $80.01 to $71.16 on October 29–30, 2026, after the Binance hacker received 823 million USDC and Circle blacklisted the address within 23 minutes. Replay how the stablecoin issuer was sold even as it acted.
CRCLB, the Binance token that tracks shares of Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, ended Thursday, October 29, much where it began: $80.01 at the end of the 19:00 UTC hour, after a day between $78.75 and $81.28. Circle's shares closed at $79.99, down 2.11%. Coinbase, Circle's partner in distributing USDC, was due to report at 20:00 UTC.
The 20:00 hour delivered two shocks. Coinbase's results showed revenue down 35% from a year earlier, and from 20:05 UTC funds began leaving Binance's hot wallets in what became the largest crypto theft on record, about $6.3 billion. The token fell 3.59% to $77.15, with a low of $76.62. At 20:41 UTC, according to a timeline published by American Banker and TRM Labs, 780 million USDC arrived in the attacker's wallet, followed by another 43 million at 20:59; at 21:04, 23 minutes after the first transfer, Circle blacklisted the address, freezing about 823 million USDC. Tether reportedly froze more than $1.5 billion of USDT. The 21:00 hour drew 37,043 trades, the most of any hour in the replay, but moved only 0.70%, to $76.59.
The freeze did not stop the selling. Investors had two worries that pulled the same way: Binance, which invested $100 million in Circle in September and is paid by Circle to promote USDC, had suspended withdrawals, and a crypto market under attack is a smaller market for stablecoins. The token reached $74.23 in the midnight hour on $3.5 million, bounced to $77.06 in the Asian morning and slid back to $74.60 by the 11:00 UTC hour. Circle had also faced criticism months earlier for not freezing USDC during the roughly $290 million Drift hack in April; chief executive Jeremy Allaire has said Circle freezes funds only when directed by law enforcement or a court, and this freeze was made in coordination with law enforcement.
The US open turned the drift into a fall. The 13:00 UTC hour, which includes the opening bell, dropped to $72.01 on $5.4 million, the heaviest hour of the replay, and the slide continued to $71.16 in the 18:00 hour, 11.1% below Thursday's close, as Coinbase fell about 11% and the Nasdaq nearly 3%. A 1.58% bounce before the close lifted the token to $72.68; Circle's shares closed at $72.54, down 9.31%, and the token ended the replay at $73.08. The lesson is that a stablecoin issuer is priced on the volume of crypto activity it serves, not on how well it behaves in a crisis: acting fast protected USDC's reputation, but it could not offset a day on which everything connected to crypto exchanges was sold. Circle reports its third-quarter results on November 4.