Global stock markets lost $3 trillion in capitalization due to the hack of the Binance crypto exchange

The world's largest crypto exchange, Binance, was attacked on October 29 by North Korean hackers who hacked the laptop of an exchange engineer and used a self-destruct mechanism. The damage caused is estimated at a record $6.3-6.4 billion, but Binance said it had frozen some of the stolen assets and had already compensated 95% of the losses from its own corporate funds.

This event became a strong stress for global markets, and October 30 became "Black Friday" for stock exchanges (a kind of Halloween holiday), as the global market lost $3 trillion in capitalization in one day.

The value of indices, stocks, gold and silver, as well as cryptocurrencies, has plummeted:

• stock indices in the US, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, China and Taiwan fell by $1.7 trillion,
• gold and silver fell by $1 trillion,
• the crypto market lost about $140 billion,
• European stocks lost an estimated €58 billion in capitalization per day.

Large funds, amid the collapse of stocks, began selling all their assets to cover losses (margin calls), which resulted in a decrease in the value of even "safe assets" - gold and silver, which lost about $1 trillion in market value.

The Shanghai Stock Exchange was the first to react to the situation, with its index falling to a one-year low on October 30. It has not fallen below that since August 2025. The CSI 300 index of large companies has been falling for the twelfth week in a row, which has never happened before in its history. Since May, the market has lost $3.5 trillion in capitalization. Artificial intelligence and chip companies have suffered the most, with the STAR50 index falling by about 40% from its July high.

The reports published by US tech giants (Intel, Amazon, Google/Alphabet) shocked the stock markets. Instead of quick super profits from AI, companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure. Intel updated its historical anti-record (minus ~30% in one day), Amazon and Alphabet collectively lost hundreds of billions of capitalization. Investors realized that the AI boom was turning into an expensive bubble, and began to sell shares en masse.

However, the situation is not a catastrophe, but rather a classic revaluation of values, when disappointments from the technology sector and the fall of crypto coincided in the markets at the same time, which once again reminded everyone: there is no endless growth on empty promises, and the victory of the Democrats in the congressional elections may increase the pressure on stocks, since large US companies supported Trump, receiving record profits from tax cuts, while the Democrats promise to increase the tax pressure on large corporations.