Binance Hackers Solana Swap: $46M Turned Into Bitcoin
Binance hackers Solana swaps have begun: the thieves moved 486,970 SOL, about $46.4 million, into bitcoin through Relay, according to Lookonchain as reported by Cointelegraph. It is a small slice of a $6.3 billion theft. It still shows where the money is heading.
What Chainalysis says the Binance hackers did on Solana
Chainalysis said on Sunday that most of the hackers’ temporary Tron wallets had been emptied and that laundering moved to Solana. It put the Tron transfers at about $500 million. Analyst SomaXBT says that figure counts repeat transfers between wallets and that about $242 million really left Tron.
Lookonchain then tracked the SOL swap into BTC. In addition, the funds had escaped the freezes imposed after Thursday’s theft. Per Cointelegraph, Tether and Circle froze about $3 billion. SomaXBT estimates the attackers still control about $3.5 billion.
Where the sources disagree
The amounts differ by outlet. Most reports, including GN Crypto, say about $46 million. Meanwhile, Brave New Coin reports about $96 million in SOL. We use the lower figure. Both are on-chain analyst counts, not official findings.
The FBI attributed the theft to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group on Saturday. Earlier context is in our pieces on the XRP and Tron laundering and the 18,270 BTC still untouched.
Miner math: what stolen coins turning into bitcoin means for your margin
Here is the live maths on November 2. Bitcoin is $77,780 and the network is 1050 EH/s, so hashprice is about $33.51 per petahash per day. That is what one PH/s of hashing earns before power.
| Machine | 5c/kWh | 8c/kWh | 12c/kWh | Break-even |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Antminer S19 (95 TH/s, 3250 W) | -$0.72 | -$3.06 | -$6.18 | 4.1c |
| Antminer S19k Pro (115 TH/s, 2645 W) | $0.68 | -$1.22 | -$3.76 | 6.1c |
| Antminer S19 XP (141 TH/s, 3010 W) | $1.11 | -$1.05 | -$3.94 | 6.5c |
| Antminer S21 Pro (234 TH/s, 3510 W) | $3.63 | $1.10 | -$2.27 | 9.3c |
Numbers are profit per day after electricity, at the three power prices shown. Break-even is the most you can pay per kilowatt-hour before the machine loses money. Specs are the manufacturer ratings; network data comes from mempool.space. Try your own power price in our free bitcoin mining profit calculator. See what these machines really sold for in our used ASIC miner price index. Want to run the same numbers on a machine you can buy today? See our used ASIC miners, or buy several at once through bulk lots.
If stolen funds turning into bitcoin pushes price down 5%: the break-even power price on an S19k Pro falls from 6.1 to 5.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. At 8 cents, daily profit goes from -$1.22 to -$1.42.
The blunt answer for miners
First, $46 million is small. Bitcoin trades far more than that in minutes, so this swap alone should not move price. The risk is the total the Binance hackers Solana route can still move. If a few billion dollars of loot ends up as bitcoin and gets sold, price takes the hit, not hashrate. Hashrate sits near 1050 EH/s per mempool.space.
We think the sensible move is to check your power price in the table above. If your S19 is underwater at a 5% lower price, see our we buy used miners page or the mining economics guides.
-Nick
ING Mining
This is general information, not financial advice. Crypto is volatile, and exchanges can fail. Please do your own research.