Ceffu pulls $264 million in bitcoin and ether off Binance

$263.8 million in bitcoin and ether left Binance on Aug. 24 after Ceffu, the exchange's custody arm, deposited 136.54 million USDC and withdrew the coins within 30 minutes.

The flow was flagged by Lookonchain, an on-chain monitoring account that posted the two Ceffu addresses — 12993...4DaAXS and 0xed9...7bCDd — on the morning of Aug. 24. Ceffu, formerly Binance Custody, holds institutional coins in cold storage and runs off-exchange settlement with Binance through Mirror-style products that keep underlying assets in segregated wallets.

The withdrawal breaks down to 1,524 BTC worth $117.89 million and 59,484 ETH worth $145.92 million. The stablecoin that came in was $136.54 million, coverage of roughly 52 cents on the dollar. About $127 million of the withdrawal left the exchange with no matching buy visible on the screen.

The funding gap decides the read. If the coins stay off the exchange, they are not available supply on Binance's books; any re-deposit within days turns the move into a round-trip shuffle and retires the accumulation story.

The 52-cent funding check

The first story everyone tells — an institution sent in $136 million and bought $264 million of bitcoin and ether — fails on its own numbers. What the screen proves is narrow: coins left Binance's wallets. For as long as they stay off the exchange, they are not available supply on its books. That is the only hard fact.

A second monitor, Onchain Lens, reported the same day that Ceffu pulled 120 million USDC off an Ethena-tagged custodial wallet on Coinbase Prime across six transactions. The link matters because Ethena is a Ceffu client: it runs the USDe synthetic dollar, whose backing is crypto assets matched with short perpetual futures. Five days before this flow, Ethena announced it was putting $1 billion of that backing into a secured credit facility with FalconX. Institutional reserve rotation between custodians and exchanges has every reason to look exactly like a stablecoin-in, coins-out shuffle.

The label has flipped before

The house convention has been that Ceffu coins in equals potential selling. In August 2024, the same monitoring account flagged Ceffu depositing 3,568 BTC — about $211.6 million — into Binance, read as institutions selling. A month later, monitors counted roughly 12,320 BTC and 85,347 ETH moving into Binance with about $515 million of USDC coming back out. In March 2026, a roughly $158 million BTC deposit, then a roughly $121 million one, were analyzed as possible downward pressure on price.

Today's move is the exact mirror — stablecoin in, coins out — and the same label flips to "institutions accumulating." The September 2024 "Ceffu is selling" scare ran into one of bitcoin's better months of that year: bitcoin rose 7.7 percent in September 2024.

Price context

Ether traded at $2,461.4, above its 50-day exponential moving average at $2,239.28 and its 200-day at $2,003.73, yet a MACD death cross at 72.14 shows fading momentum while RSI at 67.17 stays neutral. With price pressing the upper Bollinger Band at $2,513.87, a retracement toward the $2,239 EMA support looks likely before any continuation higher.

The tape matters as much as the flow. This landed about two months after bitcoin touched $59,023 on June 24 — its lowest print since October 2024 — with the crowd gauge collapsed to 12 and spot ETF outflows running a seventh straight week. Since that low, bitcoin is up roughly 30 percent, ether more, and the crowd gauge has swung to 73. In a greedy tape, the most expensive thing a retail reader can do is convert a wallet alert into a chase. The move itself is a datum — coins left an exchange order book, for now. It is not evidence that anyone front-ran you, and it is not a direction. Watch the destination and the re-deposit, not the sentiment in the comments.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.