This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).
This Week
XRP ends the week around $1.25, down 4.3%. It traded between $1.34 on Wednesday and $1.20 on Friday. It also lost 1.4% against bitcoin. Crypto as a whole fell 2.9% to $2.69 trillion, and bitcoin holds 58.3% of it. The Sensei Fear and Greed reads 37 for crypto. That is Fear, a step colder than last week’s 42.
The week belongs to Thursday afternoon. As Ripple’s Swell conference wound down in New York, someone emptied Binance’s online wallets across 10 blockchains. XRP was the first coin taken. The special section below rebuilds the heist minute by minute, and explains why it is not over.
Before that, Swell signed up Robinhood, BNY and Coinbase, and Ripple’s bank charter came through on Monday. The XRP funds took in $19.33 million in October, against $121.4 million in September. A fresh 1 billion XRP left escrow this morning. Americans vote in the midterms on Tuesday, and a second special section sets out what is priced and what comes after.
The Consensus
🕵️ The Binance heist started with 233.46 million XRP, and withdrawals have only partly reopened.
🌊 Swell 2026 brought RLUSD to Coinbase and Robinhood, and put XRP in BNY’s custody.
🏦 Ripple National Trust Bank won final approval from the OCC to hold the reserves behind RLUSD.
🗳️ The midterms come on Tuesday, with betting markets pricing about a 70% chance of a Democratic sweep.
The Numbers
The XRP Chart Watch
The Ripple Effect
🌊 Swell 2026: 5 Deals, and the One That Names XRP
What did 3 days at Swell get XRP itself? One bank. Ripple’s 10th Swell ran from Tuesday 27 to Thursday 29 October at The Shed in New York. Ripple signed a broker, a crypto exchange and BNY, the oldest bank in America. Most of the deals run on RLUSD.
Robinhood. RLUSD is now on Robinhood Chain and Bitstamp, and the main app follows later this year. Robinhood will use RLUSD on the XRP Ledger to settle with institutions.
BNY. Its custody platform now holds XRP and RLUSD for eligible institutional clients (Ripple).
Coinbase. RLUSD went live on the app, the exchange and Coinbase Prime, with transfers on the XRP Ledger, Base and Ethereum.
C2FO. The supply-chain lender will settle its Instant Pay product in RLUSD on the XRP Ledger. It has a waitlist and no launch date.
Aviva Investors. It launched a sterling share class of its £22 billion liquidity fund on the XRP Ledger.
Moody’s also rated RLUSD A2 (Decrypt). Ripple says it will end 2026 at a $900 million annual run rate for product revenue. It puts RLUSD at $2.6 billion, up 88% since January.
A rumour had run for weeks that Ripple planned to replace XRP with RLUSD. Brad Garlinghouse answered it from the stage. “We will never give up on XRP,” he said. He called the 2 assets “very complementary”. About half of all RLUSD now sits on the XRP Ledger (TipRanks). Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent opened the event with Garlinghouse on Tuesday. He did not mention XRP.
Some things never turned up. Evernorth had promised “something special”. Its chief executive is Asheesh Birla. He said the company will put its 473 million XRP to work for yield. No deal came with it. Ripple gave no new figures for XRP used in payments. Lending on the ledger is still short of the validator votes it needs.
The price told the same story. XRP closed Tuesday at about $1.33 and was back at $1.29 by Thursday, before the hack. By Sunday it sat below where Swell began.
🏦 Ripple Now Has a Bank for RLUSD’s Reserves
Ripple National Trust Bank will now hold the money behind RLUSD. The OCC, the US regulator for national banks, gave its final approval on Monday 26 October. Ripple applied in July 2025 and won conditional approval on 12 December 2025 (The Block).
The bank will manage RLUSD’s reserves, kept apart from Ripple’s own money, and act as trustee over them for RLUSD holders. It will also offer custody of digital assets once it opens. There is no opening date. “For years, we’ve said crypto and banks work better together,” Garlinghouse said (Ripple).
It is a narrow charter. A national trust bank cannot take deposits or make loans. RLUSD is still issued by Standard Custody & Trust Company under New York’s regulator, so the charter adds a federal supervisor on top. Circle won the same kind of approval in July 2026.
Not every banker is happy. The Independent Community Bankers of America sued the OCC on 2 October in federal court in Washington. The group argues the OCC had no power to open trust charters to crypto firms. The case has no ruling yet (Cointelegraph).
The charter never mentions XRP. XRP moved from $1.29 to $1.31 on the day and settled at $1.30.
🕵️ The Binance Heist: What Really Happened, and Why It Is Not Over
On Thursday afternoon, someone emptied Binance’s online wallets across 10 blockchains in about 3 hours. It is the largest crypto theft ever recorded, somewhere between $5.9 billion and $6.4 billion depending on who is counting. XRP was the first coin taken. This is the night rebuilt from the public ledgers, what Binance has told its customers, and the parts nobody has checked. All times are New York time.
Where the money was
Exchanges keep most customer coins offline, in what is called cold storage. A smaller pot stays online in hot wallets, so withdrawals can be paid out in seconds. Think of it as the cash in the till rather than the money in the vault. Binance’s till is enormous. This heist emptied it.
The rehearsal
On Wednesday 28 October, a brand-new wallet received 3 small payments from Tornado Cash. That is a service that mixes coins together so nobody can trace where they came from. Over the next 36 hours, the attackers tested their plan on throwaway wallets (TRM Labs). Nobody noticed.
4 minutes on the XRP Ledger
It began on Thursday 29 October at 4:05pm, 5 minutes after Wall Street closed. On the XRP Ledger, 5 Binance wallets sent 233.46 million XRP to one address. Each was left with only the small minimum balance the ledger requires. The whole thing took 4 minutes and 20 seconds. That was about $296 million of XRP, and it was only the opening act.
1 transaction, 50 signatures
Solana and Optimism went next. Then came the big one. A wallet like Binance’s main Ethereum wallet only pays out when Binance’s own systems approve it, much like a cheque that needs the right signatures. At 4:20pm the attackers sent it a single transaction carrying 50 of those approvals at once. Every one looked like it came from Binance, so the wallet did as it was told.
About 3 and a half minutes later it was empty. It had held 167,464 ETH and 1.62 billion USDT, a digital dollar, among 63 different tokens. In the same few minutes, 18,270 bitcoin left Binance too.
How did they get Binance’s approvals? Binance’s first answer was one engineer’s laptop that had been hacked. Later it said it had found “additional points of breach”. It still has not said what they are. TRM Labs points out that the laptop explains the Ethereum theft. It does not explain the other 9 blockchains.
The theft kept going. At 7:05pm, 3 hours after the first XRP moved, wallets on Avalanche and Polygon were still being drained.
The race to freeze
Part of the haul could be stopped. A stablecoin is a digital dollar issued by a company, and that company can lock its own tokens in any wallet, the way a bank can stop a card. The issuers raced the thieves.
5:01pm. Tether froze 971.1 million USDT.
5:04pm. Circle froze 823 million USDC.
6:01pm. Ripple froze 40.5 million RLUSD. The thieves had already sold 48 million in the 19 minutes before.
6:10pm. World Liberty Financial froze 27.8 million USD1.
8:08pm. The Arbitrum network’s security council pulled 8,426 ETH and 74.6 million ARB back out of the attacker’s wallet.
The thieves even borrowed about $44.6 million of ETH from the lending app Aave, using stolen USDT as security. Aave then froze its markets on 16 networks (CoinDesk). Nobody can do any of that to XRP. It has no company behind it. The 233.46 million XRP sits in one address, out of everyone’s reach. Elliptic’s latest public check found it had not moved.
Who did it
TRM Labs named TraderTraitor, a North Korean state hacking unit, “with high confidence”. Chainalysis reached the same view on Friday. On Saturday the FBI made it official. North Korea “was responsible for the theft of more than $6 billion USD in virtual assets from cryptocurrency exchange Binance,” it said (CBS News). It asked firms to block anything touching the thieves’ addresses. It said the loot is being swapped into ether.
The same unit took $1.5 billion from the exchange Bybit in February 2025, the FBI said at the time. This haul is about 4 times bigger. ZachXBT, the on-chain investigator, then found some of the money mixed at one address with funds from September’s $388 million hack of Bitget, another exchange.
What Binance says, and what nobody has checked
Binance says its customers lose nothing. It has put up $6.34 billion of its own money (CoinDesk). “These losses will not be passed on to users,” it said. It says 95% of the stolen coins have been replaced, and that XRP and RLUSD balances are “fully backed at 100%”.
Replaced means bought again with Binance’s money. The stolen coins are still gone. Every one of those figures comes from Binance. Even the size of the theft depends on who you ask: $6.3 billion from Binance, $6.36 billion from TRM, $6.43 billion from Elliptic. Binance’s co-founder Yi He thanked Ripple for freezing “approximately 200 million”. The tracing firms can see 40.5 million frozen. Nobody has explained the gap.
Why it is not over
Binance reopened withdrawals in stages at 1:00am on Sunday. XRP was in the first group. By 10:30am, customers had pulled out $4.65 billion and put in $1.01 billion. That is $3.64 billion gone in one morning (The Block). At 11:22am, 531 of Binance’s 552 coins still could not be withdrawn. The next stage has no date.
The thieves still control between $2.4 billion and $3.3 billion. Part of it is moving through THORChain, a swap network that has refused to freeze stolen funds before. Part is 233.46 million XRP that nobody can freeze, and that could hit the market whenever its owner chooses.
Binance’s proof of reserves lands on Monday 2 November. It is the first outside test of anything Binance has said.
Sensei’s take
Binance has always been an issue for me. I’ve been sceptical of them for a long time, and this week didn’t change that.
If I was choosing an exchange, I’d choose the ones that are publicly traded, like Coinbase, Gemini or Robinhood. They have to publish their numbers. Or the ones that have been around a long time without major problems, like Kraken. And since the ETFs launched, I don’t mind paying a little bit to hold some of the major coins through an ETF, especially if it’s more tax efficient. That’s my own preference, not advice.
What does this mean for the market? $3.64 billion left Binance in one morning. Most of those coins are moving to wallets and other exchanges, which is not the same as selling. But fear sells, and $1.57 billion of leveraged bets were wiped out on Thursday night. More selling pressure from here could turn into a capitulation, the point where people give up and sell all at once.
Remember where we are. The second half of a midterm year is normally where crypto forms its bottom. Bitcoin bottomed in December 2018, and again in November 2022, right after FTX collapsed. A bottom may well be forming again. I don’t know if this is the moment. That’s my read, and it’s why my targets on the chart above are where they are.