Without further preamble, my position is simple: CEXs don’t just parasitize cryptocurrencies, tokens, and other crypto assets — they do so with cynical audacity and alarming regularity.
2025. One Banana to Rule Them All
I won’t dive into conspiracy theories about a secret pact between Trump and CZ (even if it’s quite obvious), but here are some facts:
A vulnerability in Binance’s margin account system was exploited. During the short window between the announcement and the actual implementation of the oracle upgrade, attackers crashed the price of USDe (and other assets) exclusively on Binance, triggering a cascade of liquidations — and profiting from it.
The main vulnerability was that Binance valued collateral assets (USDe, wbETH, BnSOL) based on its own spot pricerather than external oracles. This allowed attackers to briefly crash USDe’s price to $0.65 on Binance (while it remained near $1 on other exchanges), instantly wiping out the collateral value and triggering forced liquidations worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
- You can study the analysis here: wublock.substack.com/p/opinion-is-this-crash-an-attack-on.
- Main tweet on the topic: x.com/WuBlockchain/status/1977183478790996075.
- Full thread: x.com/ElonTrades/status/1977340254047649966.
The event coincided with Binance’s announcement of switching to oracle-based pricing, but several days remained before the update went live. The attack occurred in this exact window: attackers coordinated a dump of ~$60-90 million USDe, collapsed the collateral, triggered liquidations, and simultaneously opened large short positions on HyperLiquid, earning roughly $192 million in profit.
At the same time, Trump’s new tariff news against China fueled panic and reduced liquidity, but it was Binance’s internal pricing flaw that made such a massive attack possible.
In general, CZ – much like Justin Sun – is not just a crypto whale but someone willing to use any means necessary to advance his projects. And after settling his U.S. case, he’s back — with double, if not triple, the force.
Whether it was an attack that happened during the oracle transition period (roughly between October 6 and 14) or a deliberate dump by the exchange itself — it doesn’t really matter to me, because in both cases the culprit of this “celebration” is the same.
By the way, Binance-linked Trust Wallet also went down on the 12th. Coincidence? I don’t think so…
2024. Bybit – Dumpers from Hell
As you may recall, we’re still waiting for full and detailed reports on their hack, in which the CEO himself was allegedly involved — and who, notably, has never resigned: hackernoon.com/bybit-only-has-itself-to-blame. n After the exchange took out loans it couldn’t repay, a massive crypto dump began, and — unsurprisingly — ETHsuffered more than any other asset.
And what exactly was stolen from Bybit in large quantities? I’m not trying to defend Lazarus, but this isn’t about them — it’s about the other side, which plays by the same murky rules.
Bybit shifted all blame onto Lazarus, Safe, and even Amazon’s AWS, yet ultimately presented nothing beyond a vague “preliminary analysis.” Meanwhile, the timing of the dump speaks for itself.
One could recall multiple account freezes, their shady BIT token games, and much more — but I won’t spend too much space on this, because we have other “heroes” in this play waiting ahead.
2022. FTX – Everyone’s Guilty, No One’s to Blame
Much more has been said about this story than about others — at least here, someone actually faced some form of punishment. n Unfortunately, not all did: Alameda suffered no meaningful losses, the lawyers who went after SBF didn’t either, and so on.
But is there anyone who still can’t connect the 2022 dump to FTX? n I doubt it. n And if you’re one of them, here are four sources for you:
- Wikipedia: Bankruptcy of FTX
- MIT Sloan: Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX
- Emerald Insight: Cryptocurrency Frauds — The FTX Story
- Investopedia: What Went Wrong with FTX
2014. Mt.Gox
We could also recall various incidents with Bitrix, Kraken, BTC-e, etc., but nothing compares to the “hack” of Mt.Gox.
If there’s anything truly dirty and disgraceful, it’s how that exchange behaved — which, by 2025/2024, finally bothered to start repayments, but not to everyone, not in full, and at a very understated rate.
Conclusions
“Your keys — your money” is not just a phrase, not merely a creed, but the very essence of everything we have in the crypto-asset economy (which I call the crypto-offshore).
CEXs and those who imitate them, such as HyperLiquid, are parasites on the body of Web 3.0 and the Web3 economy of deeds. They not only live and fatten off networks, protocols, and applications, but also constantly engage in extracting money by every possible means:
- Here’s research about Binance: “If you invested in every project listed on Binance in 2024, your win rate is currently only 13.5%”.
- Here’s a note on PumpFun: “Almost 99% of Pump.fun Tokens Fail”.
- Here’s…
But all that you can easily find yourself. The main thing is to honestly answer one simple question: n “Are you for open and anonymous decentralization — or for its parody?”. Web 2.5 may look beautiful, but inside that shell lies the same rotting corpse of centralized finance.
Personally, I don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past and have long since closed all my accounts on CEXs. n And you?
Alternatives
To criticize means to propose – otherwise nothing can be built on blind nihilism. All the replacements have long existed:
- For analytics – DeFiLlama, DeBank, etc.
- For fiat off-ramps – P2P & OTC, anonymous cards and exchangers.
- For cross-swaps – bridges.
- For spot – AMMs and more standard-type DEXs.
- For futures – dYdX and similar.
- For options – Derive and others (you can also replicate through LP-positions, as Panoptic did).
- For TGEs – launchpads and those same AMMs.
- For storage – hardware and other cold wallets.
- For testing and quick operations – mobile and browser wallets.
- For bonuses – Merkl and protocol incentive programs.
- For everything else – Hackernoon and the database.
By volume, DEXs have already reached roughly one-third of the market, so liquidity is sufficient. The main thing is knowing how to use it — and you don’t even have to be a trader. You can become:
- a liquidity provider in deposits,
- a liquidity provider in pools,
- a liquidator,
- a holder of positive MEV-bots,
- a funding-rate arbitrageur,
- a creator and/or curator of vaults,
- and much more.
DeFi is not a panacea, but DeFi 2.0 – with programmable assets, RWA & ReFi sectors, combined with the new cross-chain approach – is not merely an alternative, but a worthy replacement for CEXs.
