Historical replay · TRX/USD
TRX: The Hacker Bought, Then Sold (October 2026)
TRX rose 10% to $0.3654 within two hours of the Binance hack on October 29, 2026, as the attacker swapped stolen USDT into it, then fell 17% to $0.302 by Saturday night as the coins were sold a little at a time. Replay a market moved by one wallet.
TRX, the native token of the Tron blockchain, is usually one of the calmest large cryptocurrencies. On Thursday, October 29, it traded at $0.3315 in the 18:00 UTC hour and $0.3316 in the 19:00 hour, with less than 0.1% between high and low and under $1 million of volume an hour. At 20:05 UTC funds began leaving Binance's hot wallets in the theft that would be put at about $6.3 billion, and the 20:00 hour's volume jumped to $9 million.
The next two hours were frantic. The 21:00 hour rose 9.34% to $0.3606 on $29.5 million and 166,863 trades, and the 22:00 hour touched $0.3654, 10.2% above the pre-hack price, before falling to $0.337 and closing at $0.3473 on $37.9 million, the heaviest hour of the replay. The buyer was the attacker. According to the blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, the hacker swapped 234 million USDT for 638 million TRX on SunSwap, a Tron-based exchange, at an average of about $0.367. The reason is in the design: Tether can freeze USDT at any address, and it froze more than $1.5 billion of it after the hack, while TRX, as a network token, has no issuer that can block a balance.
What followed was a slow leak. On the morning of October 30 the 638 million TRX were split across five new addresses, and Elliptic counted 546 outgoing transfers between 02:00 UTC that day and 04:48 UTC on October 31, with a median gap of 96 seconds, one seller feeding the market around the clock. The chart shows it: after a bounce to $0.359 in the midnight hour, TRX fell 2.73% in the 05:00 hour to $0.335, held near $0.332 through Friday, lost 1.56% in the midnight hour of Saturday to $0.322 and then slid almost every hour. Volume rose as the price fell, to $4.1 million in the 17:00 UTC hour and $6.4 million at 18:00, and the 22:00 hour reached $0.302, 8.7% below the pre-hack price, 17.3% below the peak and the lowest level since March.
By then Elliptic estimated the attacker still held about 475 million TRX, worth about $143 million, while TRX's market value had fallen by roughly $1.5 billion, about ten times the stash, because every trader knew the overhang was there. The replay ends with the first sign of a turn: the midnight hour of Sunday, November 1, spiked to $0.3215 and closed 1.78% higher at $0.3091 on $14.3 million, and TRX ended the replay at $0.31, hours before Binance reopened withdrawals for TRX among its first assets. The episode shows a risk that rarely appears in a token's fundamentals: when a hacker cannot keep stolen stablecoins, the asset they choose to hold instead becomes the market's problem, first on the way in and then, for days, on the way out.