Ethereum after the Binance hack: Tom Lee sees a 4% drop as bullish

Tom Lee, chairman of BitMine, says the crypto market's calm reaction to Binance's $6.3 billion hack points to a bull market. He focused on Ethereum's roughly 4% decline after the Oct. 29 theft. That loss was more than four times the size of the $1.5 billion taken from Bybit in February 2025.

Lee's comparison has a catch. The 20% Bybit figure covers a full week after that breach, while the Binance number covers only the days since Oct. 29. Ethereum dropped 8% the day the Bybit hack was disclosed and reached a 20% loss within a week, according to Lee.

In a Nov. 2 statement, Lee called the market response very constructive and listed six factors behind it. Among them: Binance's ability to cover customer losses, quick action by stablecoin issuers, and no cascading failures across decentralized finance platforms.

Binance first pledged more than $6 billion of company funds to cover the stolen assets. By Nov. 2, the exchange said it had restored about 95% of the affected assets using its own treasury and insurance reserves. It also said users could check that ten major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and BNB, were backed at least 1:1 in its Oct. 31 proof-of-reserves snapshot.

Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic verified roughly $2.85 billion in frozen or seized assets, or 44% of the theft. Tether and Circle were among the companies that restricted compromised tokens, and other issuers and networks took similar steps.

Lee also pointed to the speed of the investigation. The FBI identified North Korea's TraderTraitor group as responsible within two days, versus earlier incidents where attribution took much longer. Investigators tied the Binance breach to compromised corporate infrastructure, not to a failure in Ethereum or another blockchain's protocol.

BitMine added another 8,573 ETH in the latest reporting week. Its holdings reached 6,060,506 tokens as of Nov. 1, about 4.9% of Ethereum's circulating supply. That gives the company a direct financial stake in how ETH trades.

The wider portfolio tells a different story. The value of BitMine's crypto assets, cash, marketable securities and other investments fell from $17.4 billion on Oct. 4 to $14.5 billion on Nov. 1, even as the company kept accumulating. Prices in BitMine's releases show Ethereum down about 17% between Oct. 4 and Nov. 1.

The bullish read rests on a comparison of two different time windows, so the 4% and 20% figures don't line up one to one. Elliptic estimated on Nov. 2 that about $3 billion of the stolen assets remained unaccounted for.

Lee's view is his own, and BitMine's stake in Ethereum is worth keeping in mind when weighing it.