Bitcoin Slumps Near $65K as DOJ Moves to Seize $1.2B Stolen From Binance

The Department of Justice said it won court authorization to seize or restrain more than $1.2 billion in crypto stolen from Binance, announcing the move on 13 November 2026. It pins the theft on North Korean military hackers. The attack landed on or about 29 October and drained more than $6 billion from the exchange. Government and private-sector work has already frozen more than $2.7 billion of that haul.

The FBI has a name for the crew: TraderTraitor. The DOJ describes its members as North Korean military personnel. Separately, the department said it disrupted FaceStealer, a scam that impersonated identities and pulled in more than $400 million in crypto over 18 months by tricking people into handing over access or credentials. Under a federal warrant, the FBI seized over 900 webcam videos of FaceStealer victims along with cloud infrastructure the operation used.

Bitcoin was trading near $65,000 on 14 November, its weakest level since the summer. The coin shed more than 5% in 24 hours and almost 14% over the week, leaving it almost 49% below its record high of about $126,000 from October 2025.

Exchange-traded funds bled alongside it. US crypto ETFs holding Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Hyperliquid and Zcash logged $1.53 billion in net outflows in the week of 9 to 13 November, with Bitcoin funds accounting for $1.065 billion and Ethereum funds losing $398.9 million despite a small net inflow on Friday. Farside data shows Bitcoin ETFs lost $185.4 million on 13 November alone, a seventh straight day of withdrawals, as BlackRock's IBIT gave back $143.5 million and Fidelity's FBTC $41.9 million.

Leverage got torched. More than $1 billion in positions were forcibly closed within 24 hours, per CoinGlass, and 93% of them were bets on rising prices. More than 195,000 traders were hit. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index slid to 13, deep in extreme fear, down from 20 on Friday and 28 on Thursday, while CoinGecko put the total crypto market at about $2.22 trillion, down more than 7% in a day. XRP dropped below $1 and Ether below $1,850.

Two dated events sit ahead. The XRP Ledger's Testnet and Devnet reset on Wednesday 25 November 2026, wiping accounts, transactions, balances, settings, offers, automated market makers and escrows on those test networks after a single full history server crashed beyond recovery, while mainnet runs as usual. Then MSCI's November 2026 review puts Strategy's MSTR shares, recorded as STRATEGY A, up for deletion from the MSCI USA Index at the close on 30 November 2026, along with the MSCI World and All Country World indexes.