Flow Loses Key Binance Trading Pairs Following $3.9m Hack
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Following the Flow Foundation’s announcement of a security incident that affected the Flow blockchain on December 27, Binance has decided to remove two margin trading pairs involving the FLOW coin.
The world’s largest exchange announced on January 2 that it will delist the Cross Margin Pair FLOW/BTC and the Isolated Margin Pair FLOW/BTC. In its announcement, the exchange said that the pairs are to be removed on Saturday, January 3, but users have lost the ability to transfer any amount of asset of the two pairs into their Isolated Margin accounts as of January 2.
“If users hold outstanding liabilities of said tokens, these users may only manually transfer up to the amount of liabilities of that token into their Isolated Margin accounts, less any collateral already available,” the announcement said.
During the delisting process, Binance Margin closed users’ positions, conducted automatic settlements, and cancelled all pending orders on the mentioned cross and isolated margin pairs.
Binance Adjusts Trading Access As Investigation of The Incident Shifts To Exchange Security
As mentioned, Binance’s adjustment of its trading and monitoring policies comes after the $3.9 million exploit, during which attackers extracted tokens and attempted to move funds through centralized exchanges.
After the initial investigation of the incident, Flow said it was concerned by one exchange’s handling of this incident, pointing to an alleged AML and KYC failure, which allowed the hacker or hackers to deposit stolen tokens and swap a portion of them with Bitcoin, and then withdraw the funds.
Flow did not name the exchange in question, but some have speculated that it might be Binance. The exchange did not address the speculation, and instead, it reacted to the incident by removing nine spot trading pairs, including the FLOW/Bitcoin pair, and placing Flow alongside three other tokens under its internal monitoring tag system.
The system is applied to assets that show considerably higher volatility and risks compared to other listed cryptos, and they typically face closer review and have a higher risk of being delisted if they don’t meet the listing requirements.
The exchange did not blame the Flow exploit for the removal of the pairs, instead saying that the move comes due to “recent reviews.” Binance addressed the exploit in a separate blog post on December 29.
It is also worth noting that the incident happened at a sensitive time for centralized exchanges, which are now under growing pressure to demonstrate robust transaction monitoring and post-exploit response systems. When stolen funds successfully pass through regulated platforms, surveillance questions start to emerge, leading to compliance enforcement and cooperation with affected networks.
Binance’s decision to reduce trading access and apply monitoring tags suggests that the exchange is willing to distance itself from assets that are being investigated for poor security or have reputational issues.
