Binance did not trigger the cryptocurrency market liquidation event on October 10, but all exchanges, centralized or decentralized, experienced mass liquidations that day after China imposed rare earth metals controls and the United States announced new tariffs, said Binance co-CEO Richard Teng.
About 75% of the liquidations took place around 9:00 p.m. ET, along with two isolated and unrelated issues: a decoupling from the stablecoin and “some slowness in terms of asset transfers,” Teng said Thursday at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference.
“The US stock market plummeted $1.5 trillion in value that day,” he said. “The US stock market alone saw a $150 billion sell-off. The cryptocurrency market is much smaller. It was around $19 billion. And the cryptocurrency sell-off occurred 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, it said, with 300 million users. Trading data does not indicate any mass withdrawals from the platform.
“The data speaks for itself,” he said.
Speaking more broadly, Teng said the cryptocurrency market was following broader geopolitical tensions, but that institutions are still entering the sector.
“On a macro level, I think people are still uncertain about future interest rate movements,” he said. “And there is always the trend of geopolitics, tension, etc. That weighs on these assets, like cryptocurrencies.”
However, noting how the sector has changed over the past four to six years, Teng said long-term industry participants will have noticed that cryptocurrency prices move cyclically.
“I think what we have to look at is the underlying development,” he said. “Right now, retail demand is somewhat weaker compared to last year, but institutional and corporate deployment remains strong.”
Institutions are still entering the sector, even despite the market, he said, “which means smart money is rolling out.”
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