OKX CEO says Binance’s USDe yield campaign caused Oct. 10 $19B crash

OKX CEO Star Xu on Jan. 31 accused Binance of triggering the October 10 market collapse that wiped about $19 billion from crypto markets, saying the crash resulted from Binance’s aggressive promotion of Ethena’s synthetic dollar, USDe. In a post on X, Xu said Binance offered a 12% annual yield on USDe and allowed users to collateralize it like USDT and USDC, creating what he called a “leveraged loop” that encouraged excessive leverage and pushed apparent APYs as high as 70%.

Xu wrote, “No complexity. No accident. 10/10 was caused by irresponsible marketing campaigns by certain companies.” Xu argued that USDe’s delta-neutral hedging carried “hedge-fund-level structural risks,” and that when volatility hit on October 10 the leverage unwound, USDe depegged and a cascade of liquidations overwhelmed risk engines—briefly sending some tokens such as WETH and BNSOL toward near-zero levels, he said.

Binance and other industry figures disputed Xu’s account. Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi and Ethena Labs founder Guy Young cited order-book and transaction data showing Bitcoin’s price bottomed about 30 minutes before USDe’s discrepancy on Binance, arguing the USDe depeg followed the market crash rather than caused it.

Binance said the episode stemmed from a “liquidity vacuum,” with Bitcoin liquidity “zero or near zero” across venues, blaming pulled market-maker inventory and API latency and denying systemic manipulation.

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