The debate over what truly triggered the violent October 10 crypto market sell-off is heating up again, as major industry leaders publicly challenge OKX CEO Star Xu’s claim that Binance and Ethena’s USDe yield mechanics were the root cause of the collapse.
In recent days, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ), Dragonfly Capital partner Haseeb Qureshi, and Wintermute founder Evgeny Gaevoy have all pushed back strongly against the narrative, arguing that macroeconomic panic, liquidity stress, and market structure weaknesses, not a single platform’s product design, drove the crash.
Their responses, widely shared across Crypto Twitter and industry forums, are now reshaping how the market revisits one of the most destructive liquidation events since the FTX era.
CZ Attributes Crash To Macro Shock, Not Exchange Failures
CZ addressed the controversy directly during a Binance Square AMA on January 31, 2026, where he emphasized that the October 10 sell-off was largely driven by tariff-related macroeconomic news that spooked global risk markets, not internal failures at Binance.
According to CZ, Bitcoin’s current market depth and global liquidity make it extremely difficult for any single entity to manipulate prices through isolated dumping or localized dislocations.
While Binance’s post-incident review did acknowledge two technical irregularities on the day of the crash, including temporary UI transfer issues and certain index price deviations, CZ firmly rejected the idea that these anomalies triggered the broader market collapse.
Instead, he framed the sell-off as a classic panic-driven cascade amplified by high leverage, thin liquidity during volatility, and macro fear spilling into crypto.
OKX’s founder also weighed in alongside the discussion, noting that product design choices, risk controls, and infrastructure behavior at major platforms can intensify stress during extreme market moments, but stopped short of blaming any single exchange as the primary cause.
Haseeb Dismantles The USDe Leverage Theory
Among the strongest critics of Star Xu’s narrative is Dragonfly Capital partner Haseeb Qureshi, who publicly rejected the claim that Binance’s USDe yield campaign triggered the October crash.
In a detailed breakdown shared on X, Haseeb argued that the timeline, market data, and cross-exchange behavior simply do not support the idea that USDe caused, or even meaningfully amplified, the liquidation spiral.
At the heart of Star Xu’s argument is the idea that Binance encouraged traders to loop USDe as collateral, building extreme leverage that eventually unraveled from a small price shock.
But Haseeb says the numbers tell a very different story.
Bitcoin, he pointed out, bottomed nearly 30 minutes before USDe experienced any meaningful price divergence on Binance.
“That alone breaks the causal link,” he explained. “USDe could not have triggered the liquidation cascade if the cascade already happened.”
In other words, the crash was already in motion before USDe showed stress.
Isolated Depeg Fails To Explain Global Liquidations
Haseeb further emphasized that USDe’s price dislocation occurred almost exclusively on Binance.
On other exchanges and trading venues, USDe remained largely stable, while massive liquidations were simultaneously ripping through every major crypto platform worldwide.
This, he argued, makes it impossible for USDe to be the systemic driver.
When true systemic collapses occur, like Terra, Three Arrows Capital, or FTX, the damage propagates everywhere. Balance sheets implode across venues. Prices diverge globally. Liquidity disappears universally.
That’s not what happened with USDe.
“If a depeg doesn’t spread cross-exchange, it can’t explain a market-wide wipeout,” Haseeb noted.
Even when giving Star Xu’s theory the benefit of the doubt, suggesting USDe might have amplified the crash rather than caused it, the argument still falls apart, according to Haseeb, because there was no evidence of global contagion from the asset.
Instead, the data points to broader forces: tariff-driven fear, Binance API disruptions, forced liquidations, ADL mechanisms triggering, and the absence of stabilizing buffers common in traditional financial markets.
Timing And Motives Come Under Scrutiny
Haseeb also questioned why Star Xu is pushing this narrative months after the event, without presenting any new evidence.
Order book data, liquidation flows, and price movements have been publicly available since October and thoroughly analyzed by traders, researchers, and on-chain analysts.
Yet only now is OKX’s CEO framing the crash around Binance and Ethena.
To Haseeb, the sudden reemergence of the theory feels less like a data-driven discovery and more like a strategic escalation between industry heavyweights.
“This looks like picking a fight and using a simple story to make it sound like CZ caused 10/10 through irresponsibility,” he suggested.
The implication is clear: the debate may now be as much about industry rivalry as it is about market mechanics.
Wintermute Warns Against Scapegoating A Single Platform
Wintermute founder Evgeny Gaevoy added another layer of perspective, cautioning against the emotional tendency to pin complex market collapses on one company.
In his view, attributing a multi-billion-dollar systemic sell-off to a single exchange oversimplifies how modern crypto markets function.
Kind of wish public figures would pick words more carefully. 10/10 was very obviously not a “software glitch”. It was a flash crash on mega leveraged market on illiquid Friday night driven by macro news.
And since we are here, I get that nobody likes being in bear market,… https://t.co/uUrwqrbS8t
— wishful_cynic (@EvgenyGaevoy) January 30, 2026
Gaevoy explained that in bearish environments, especially when other asset classes are rising while crypto struggles, investors naturally look for a villain.
But markets driven by leverage, automated liquidations, global liquidity flows, and sentiment feedback loops rarely collapse from one isolated trigger.
“Blaming one platform might feel emotionally satisfying,” he said, “but it’s logically weak.”
Instead, he pointed to structural fragility across crypto: high leverage tolerance, thin order books during volatility, reflexive liquidations, and limited circuit-breaker mechanisms.
In such conditions, any macro shock can spiral into a cascading collapse.
A Broader Reckoning For Crypto Market Structure
Taken together, the responses from CZ, Haseeb, and Gaevoy paint a picture far more complex than a single yield product gone wrong.
Rather than one exchange creating a meltdown, the October 10 crash increasingly appears to reflect:
• Macro-driven panic spilling into risk assets
• Overleveraged trading across platforms
• Automated liquidation systems accelerating sell-offs
• Infrastructure strain during peak volatility
• A lack of stabilizing market safeguards
While product design and risk controls certainly matter, industry leaders now argue that focusing solely on Binance and USDe misses the deeper structural vulnerabilities that continue to haunt crypto markets.
The renewed debate is forcing a hard truth back into the spotlight: until leverage culture, liquidity resilience, and systemic safeguards improve, crypto will remain vulnerable to violent cascades, regardless of which platform hosts the next popular yield product.
And as this latest clash between top executives shows, the fight to define the narrative of October 10 is far from over.
Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any services.
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Source: https://nulltx.com/cz-haseeb-and-wintermute-push-back-on-okx-ceos-october-crash-narrative/