Strive CEO: Bitcoin’s performance post-Binance hack has been better than expected, but it’s still too early to confirm a market bottom.

On October 31, Matt Cole, CEO of Strive, commented on the ~$6.3 billion asset theft from Binance: the incident has not shaken his long-term Bitcoin investment stance. He noted that although the attack was massive and market-wide pressure is mounting, Bitcoin’s actual decline—down roughly 4% from its level just before the attack began on Thursday, currently trading around $77,400—was milder than he had anticipated. However, he stressed it remains too early to determine whether prices have bottomed out. As of October 23, Strive held 43,000 BTC—a position previously disclosed publicly. Cole characterized the event as “akin to a bank robbery,” not a failure of the Bitcoin network itself; Paul Chapman, Head of Financial Crime at Wirex, echoed this, emphasizing that the breach targeted an internal system of a company—not the Bitcoin protocol’s underlying infrastructure. Looking ahead, Cole described current market conditions as an “early spring”-style recovery phase—likely to last six to nine months—with prices rising gradually rather than surging explosively. He reaffirmed that, across any reasonable observation horizon, this incident will not undermine Strive’s core Bitcoin investment thesis. Historical context offers perspective: following Bybit’s $1.5 billion theft in 2025, Bitcoin dipped from near $100,000 to approximately $95,000—a ~5% drop amid broader market volatility. CNBC, citing Anchorage Digital data, reported that Bitcoin’s average 24-hour decline after prior crypto exchange hacks stands at 8.3%. The investigation remains ongoing; Ido Ben-Natan, CEO of Blockaid, analyzed that attackers may have exploited a vulnerability in Binance’s transaction signing mechanism—identifying one Ethereum-chain transaction bearing 50 signature authorizations, where the matching authorization rules permitted code controlled by the attackers to execute operations via that wallet. Binance stated on Friday that it has found no conclusive evidence of private key compromise from the affected wallet.