“If Binance were to turn up today and say, 'Hey, guys, you can only take out a billion dollars a day for the next 90 days,' it would be over. You can't say that, because the adversarial nature of crypto is people go, 'Oh, you only have a billion dollars,' and everyone would freak out and start nuking everything.”
Unchained · Crypto & Web3 · November 2026
Context
The guests were debating whether withdrawal or borrowing limits could have contained the losses from the Binance hack. Kain Warwick explains why an exchange can't throttle withdrawals without triggering a bank run.
Transcript
…grinds to a halt and everyone's like waiting because North Korea's dumped a billion dollars in. And so now no one can borrow for the next month because the ratchet is sitting there. Like these are all non-trivial things to solve, right? Like clearly you guys are trying to balance this. Well, yeah,
…how much usability and immediate access to capital do we want to allow versus how much security and sort of decentralized kind of using NPC, you know, multiple signatures across multiple parties distributed. So how difficult we want to make it to access those funds and use, put their money to use.
You know, it's interesting, right? Because someone I know in one of the groups I'm in was like, do we remember the Bimex days of like the daily withdrawal window? And everyone was like, holy shit. No, we actually didn't all remember that. You were the only one. And it's kind of, you know, it's kind of funny, right? Because there is this like bank run risk that every exchange needs to balance. If you say, you know, if Binance were to turn up today and say, all right, hey, guys, you can only take out a billion dollars a day for the next 90 days, it would be over. Like, you can't say that because immediately. The adversarial nature of crypto is people go, oh, you only have a billion dollars, and you're like scrounging through, you know, uh, CZ's couch cushions to find the next billion for tomorrow to let us out. And everyone would freak out and start nuking everything, and the world would explode, right? Um, and so you can't just be like, You can't have your money, you need to like, and you definitely can't change the rules, but at the same time, you've got to have this balance of like, should we…
yeah yeah so this this
actually um reminds me of another point that i wanted to make about the the incident and the response on aave so when we uh convened at the war room and made the decision to freeze the markets i also wanted to talk a little bit about uh what freezing means because going off of what you you're…
got yeah cool okay um all right let's go to ads we'll come back and we'll we'll talk some more about this because this is definitely the biggest thing to talk about the choice yeah yeah all right uh we'll be back in a minute
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