Binance Delists Flow Pairs, Adds Tokens to Risk Watch After $3.9M Hack

Binance just made a defensive play—delisting Flow trading pairs and slapping tokens on its risk watchlist. The trigger? A $3.9 million hack that's got the exchange tightening security protocols.

Security First, Trading Second

The move follows a significant exploit on the Flow network. Binance isn't taking chances—pulling affected pairs from its platform and flagging related assets for extra scrutiny. It's a classic exchange maneuver: isolate the risk, protect the broader ecosystem.

The Ripple Effect of a Single Breach

One platform's hack becomes everyone's problem. Binance's response shows how interconnected crypto markets really are. When security fails on one chain, major exchanges act as the first line of defense—sometimes by cutting off access entirely.

Risk Management or Overreaction?

Delisting pairs protects users but also limits liquidity. Adding tokens to watchlists creates uncertainty. It's the eternal exchange dilemma—balance security against market function. Sometimes the safest move looks like an overcorrection from the outside.

This is crypto's version of financial hygiene—occasionally you need to quarantine the sick assets to keep the rest healthy. Even if it means some traders lose their favorite pairs temporarily. The $3.9 million lesson? In crypto, someone else's security failure becomes your trading restriction faster than you can say 'risk management'—which, in traditional finance, usually just means passing the loss to shareholders anyway.

Flow hack exposes vulnerabilities and sparks market turmoil

On December 27, 2025, the Flow network was hacked by a hacker who exploited a weakness to mint fraudulent FLOW tokens, sparking a rapid sell‑off and liquidity crisis on exchanges. The hack is said to have shaved about 40% off Flow’s market price in the immediate days after the attack. 

The label is applied to tokens that exhibit “notably higher volatility and risks compared to other listed tokens,” the exchange stated, noting that the monitoring flag indicates the risk of tokens no longer meeting listing requirements.

Binance stated that the decisive moves followed “recent reviews” of the tokens, but did not explicitly mention the Flow exploit on Saturday. Reporters reached out to the exchange for comment on the exploit, but had not received a response at the time of publication.

In a preliminary post-mortem report on the exploit, Flow said it was “concerned by one exchange’s handling of this incident,” referring to an “AML/KYC failure” that allowed the hackers to deposit the stolen FLOW tokens, convert some to Bitcoin, and withdraw the funds. Some users speculated that, based on Flow’s description, the unnamed exchange could have been Binance.

Restoration underway as exchanges and developers respond

As of Friday, the Flow Foundation noted that it was working on fully restoring the blockchain ecosystem as part of a plan to address the $3.9 million exploit. According to the platform, the only steps remaining in the plan were to address user account restoration and remediate fraudulent tokens.

“What was initially projected as a sequential, multi-day process has been executed in parallel, restoring both Cadence and EVM [Ethereum VIRTUAL Machine] functionality while maintaining surgical precision in removing fraudulent assets and preserving legitimate transaction history,” said Flow

The delisting news follows the scrapping of a proposal from earlier this week that included a rollback of the blockchain, which it halted amid criticism from many users. According to the platform, it expected to release a comprehensive post-mortem report on the hack “within 48 hours” with “complete ecosystem restoration expected this week.”

In an official update, Binance stated that it had traced and frozen the hacker’s remaining funds held on its platform to protect users, while urging the Flow project team to provide a detailed post-mortem of the exploit. Binance also emphasized that if the Flow team implements any recovery mechanism, exchange wallets should be excluded from such rollbacks to prevent complicating user balances.

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