Crypto exchange Binance is converting its $1 billion Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) from stablecoins entirely into Bitcoin, per a Thursday blog post.
Binance plans to complete the conversion over the next month.
If the market value of the Bitcoin holdings falls below $800 million, the exchange will inject additional capital to restore the balance to $1 billion. Binance also disclosed that it held $162.8 billion in assets by the end of 2025 for over 306 million users.
Binance announced its SAFU conversion on the same day that bitcoin suffered a 6% drawdown. Bitcoin corrected to $81,600, its lowest level since April 2025, as it was dragged down into a broader market sell off that afflicted everything from stocks to gold.
The insurance fund’s enigmatic name is a nod to a 2018 meme, which likely surfaced from a viral parody video which depicts Binance’s Founder and then-CEO Changpeng Zhao mispronouncing “safe” as “safu.” Zhao then adopted the botched spelling, and he used it as a way to signal that funds were secure during a 2019 hack, even though 7,000 BTC were stolen during the incident.
Following this incident in May 2018, Binance established the SAFU fund in July of the same year.
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