$5.56B Whale Money Floods Binance — Bitcoin Top Incoming or Exchange Power Play?

A staggering $5.56 billion in whale-sized Bitcoin transactions has poured into Binance over the past 30 days, sparking heated debate across the crypto community about whether whales are preparing for a selloff — or if the world’s largest exchange is orchestrating something far more complex behind the scenes.

On October 21 alone, Binance recorded $1.07 billion in inflows from transactions exceeding 1,000 BTC each. The influx coincided with Bitcoin’s brief surge from $108,000 to $113,000, followed by a sharp retracement — a pattern that some analysts say hints at exchange-driven liquidity manipulation rather than natural market momentum.

Adding fuel to the speculation, several on-chain analysts have accused Binance of working in tandem with market maker Wintermute to distort prices and trigger cascading liquidations across the derivatives market. This follows the October 10 crash, where over $19 billion in retail positions were liquidated in a matter of hours — a wipeout many now suspect wasn’t purely coincidental.

According to data from Whale Alert, October 21 saw multiple highly concentrated bursts of whale activity:

• $336.95 million transferred at 18:00,
• $323.43 million at 10:00, and
• $162.24 million at 08:00.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin has since pulled back to around $109,000, erasing most of Monday’s gains after briefly touching $114,000.

Adding another layer of intrigue, the timing of these transactions aligns with $1.83 billion in Bitcoin movements from wallets linked to Chinese mining pool LuBian — marking the second major transfer in two weeks from an entity previously tied to one of the largest confirmed Bitcoin thefts in history.

With these movements converging — Binance inflows, suspicious market patterns, and large-scale mining transfers — traders are left questioning:

Are whales quietly offloading before a correction, or are the exchanges once again pulling strings in the shadows of crypto’s most volatile asset?