Bitcoin has held up better than expected following the record $6.3 billion hack against Binance, according to Strive CEO Matt Cole, who said the breach does not undermine the cryptocurrency's long-term investment thesis.

Speaking on Cointelegraph's Chain Reaction on Friday (https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/2116245513259676112), Cole said the attack had not changed his long-term investment case for Bitcoin. He compared the compromise of Binance's wallets to a bank robbery rather than a failure of Bitcoin's network itself.

"I do have conviction that over any reasonable time frame, this does not change the investment thesis on Bitcoin," Cole said.

Bitcoin traded near $77,400 at 4:00 pm on Saturday, about 4% below its price shortly before the attack began on Thursday, according to CoinGecko data. Cole said the decline was less severe than he expected given the scale of the breach and broader market weakness, although he acknowledged it was too early to determine whether the cryptocurrency had reached a price bottom.

Cole described the market as being in an "early spring" recovery phase that could last another six to nine months, with prices gradually rising rather than surging to new highs.

Strive, a publicly traded company that holds Bitcoin on its balance sheet, reported owning 43,000 BTC as of Oct. 23 — a holding that directly ties the company's treasury to the investment thesis Cole defended.

Paul Chapman, financial crime director at Wirex, also distinguished the attack on Binance from a compromise of Bitcoin's network. "It's important to be clear that Bitcoin itself hasn't been hacked — this was an attack on one company's systems, not the network," he told Cointelegraph.

Related: Strive closes $630M SATS IPO, leaves Bitcoin allocation unspecified

Largest crypto hack on record

According to Glassnode, Thursday's Binance breach — which Cointelegraph recapped in detail — was the largest cryptocurrency hack on record, with around $6.3 billion affected, exceeding the combined losses from the next nine largest hacks. The previous record was the $1.5 billion Bybit exploit in February 2025. Glassnode said three of the 10 largest crypto hacks have occurred since the beginning of 2025, all involving exchanges. That pattern places exchange platforms, rather than the underlying blockchains, at the center of the industry's largest recorded losses.

By comparison, after the Bybit hack in 2025, Bitcoin fell roughly 5% from nearly $100,000 to around $95,000 amid the breach and broader market volatility, according to a Bitfinex market report. Anchorage Digital data cited by CNBC put Bitcoin's average decline in the first 24 hours after previous crypto exchange exploits at 8.3%.

Binance hack exposes exchange security vulnerabilities

Blockaid CEO Ido Ben-Natan said the attackers appeared to have compromised Binance's transaction signing process. Binance said on Friday that it had found no evidence of leaked wallet private keys, though its investigation remained ongoing.

Blockaid's analysis identified an Ethereum transaction containing 50 signed authorizations covering different transaction counts. A matching authorization allowed attacker-controlled code to operate through the wallet. Ben-Natan argued that checks before signing could have blocked the malicious authorization. How the attackers obtained the valid authorizations remains publicly unexplained, making the outcome of Binance's ongoing investigation the key development to watch.

Magazine: Tampered Ledger reported in Singapore a month before news broke: Asia Express