Benson Sun: Short-term selling pressure from stolen BTC is nearly zero, while ETH is more likely to face selling pressure.

Coinkarma founder Benson Sun stated in a post that Binance has confirmed freezing roughly $2.5 billion in assets from its recent hack, accounting for about half of the total stolen funds, with the remainder primarily consisting of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH). The stolen BTC is valued at around $1 billion, but Bitcoin lacks deep mixing pools comparable to Tornado Cash, meaning related addresses will be flagged by exchanges and on-chain analytics firms, making cashing out far more difficult than for ETH. Recalling past cases—including the 2016 Bitfinex hack where stolen BTC remained untouched for years, and the 1,800 BTC stolen from Coldcard in July this year that was still 90% unspent by early September—this latest breach is larger in scale. Stolen funds will take years to launder via address splitting, mixing, and discounted over-the-counter (OTC) trading, so short-term selling pressure is nearly negligible. If Binance uses its Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) to compensate users and repurchase Bitcoin, it could even generate buying pressure. By contrast, large amounts of ERC-20 tokens converted to ETH before entering Tornado Cash are harder to trace, so the actual potential market selling pressure may be around $1 billion. Sun added that market confidence will be impacted, but direct Bitcoin selling pressure is not as significant as feared, and he urged the industry to prioritize security frameworks for hot wallet management, signature authorization, and anti-quantum defenses in the post-AI era.