Binance did not cause the Oct. 10 crypto market liquidation event, but every exchange — centralized or decentralized — saw massive liquidations that day after China imposed rare earth controls and the U.S. announced new tariffs, Binance Co-CEO Richard Teng said.
About 75% of the liquidations took place around 9:00 p.m. ET, along with two unrelated, isolated issues: a stablecoin peg and “some slowness in terms of asset transfer,” Teng said Thursday at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference.
“The US stock market lost $1.5 trillion in value that day,” he said. “The US stock market alone saw a liquidation of $150 billion. The crypto market is much smaller. It was about $19 billion. And the liquidation on crypto happened across all exchanges.”
Some users were affected by this, which Binance helped support, he said, an action that other exchanges did not take.
Binance facilitated $34 trillion in trading volume last year, he said, with 300 million users. Trading data does not show that there were any massive withdrawals from the platform.
“The data speaks for itself,” he said.
More broadly, Teng said the crypto market was tracking broader geopolitical tensions, but that institutions are still pouring into the sector.
“At a macro level, I think people are still uncertain about interest rate movements going forward,” he said. “And there’s always the trend of geopolitics, tensions, etc. They weigh on these assets, like crypto.”
But long-term industry participants will have seen crypto prices move cyclically, he said, pointing to how the sector has changed in the past four to six years.
“I think what we need to look at is the underlying development,” he said. “At this point, retail demand is somewhat more muted compared to the past year, but the institutional spread, the corporate spread is still strong.”
Institutions are still entering the sector even despite the market, he said, “which means the smart money is being implemented.”
