OKX EXCHANGE CEO BLAMES BINANCE "LEVERAGE LOOP" FOR CATASTROPHIC 10/10 MARKET COLLAPSE Star Xu, Founder of OKX, argues that the 10/10 crash was a man-made crisis fueled by Binance’s aggressive push for market dominance. The trouble began when Binance officially integrated USDe, an external 'stablecoin', directly into its core financial plumbing. Binance launched a massive marketing campaign offering a 12% APY just for holding USDe, specifically to lure users away from competitors like USDT or USDC with much stronger track records. Critically, Binance allowed USDe to be used as collateral for high-stakes futures and margin trading, treating it with the same trust as actual cash. While Binance marketed it as a "stable" reward-bearing asset, USDe is actually a complex "synthetic dollar" that carries the structural risks of a hedge fund. Binance’s system enabled a dangerous "leverage loop": users used USDe as collateral to borrow USDT, then used that USDT to buy even more USDe. This recursive cycle on Binance’s platform inflated returns to 70%+, creating a massive bubble of hidden debt that was invisible to everyday investors. By October 10th, Binance’s internal market was so over-leveraged that it had become a "powder keg" waiting for a spark. When the market dipped, a large institution on Binance was liquidated, forcing the system to dump massive amounts of USDe at once. Because Binance’s internal "oracle" (price feed) failed to keep up with the crash, the price of USDe on the exchange plummeted to $0.60, while remaining stable elsewhere. This "depeg" on Binance triggered a catastrophic chain reaction of $20 billion in liquidations, wiping out traders who thought their collateral was safe. Star notes that this event proved how an exchange's own marketing and technical flaws can cause a global market meltdown. Star believes the industry must stop allowing exchanges to run "short-term yield games" that put the entire ecosystem at risk. He argues that as world's largest exchange, Binance failed its responsibility to prioritize market stability over aggressive user acquisition. He expects Binance supporters to attack him with FUD, but insists that calling out these "winner-take-all" tactics is necessary. For those of you who held Bitcoin in cold storage, you had nothing to worry about.