AFAIK within the last few hours it looks like the Binance API was hacked, and someone set up a ton of sell orders on their account for SYSCOIN, 51% attacked the network and only mined empty blocks. Subsequently they withdrew 7000 BTC from the exchange.
Can you explain this in plain English for people not keyed in on cryptocurrency?
Binance is a crypto currency exchange that lets users trade in two ways: through their web and mobile apps and through an Application Programming Interface (API) that lets developers write software to write trades. This API uses access credentials called keys that authenticate the different traders. The leading theory/rumor on what happened earlier today is that someone in an unknown way managed to hijack a significant number of API keys, or otherwise compromise the API server to impersonate a large number of users. They used this deceitful move in coordination with a primary account that they controlled. On this primary account they put a lot of SYSCoin for sale ( I've only heard of Syscoin for the first time today.) They had the hacked API credentials buy a lot of their sell orders to generate a significant amount ~50MM of bitcoin. In addition it seems that there was a denial of service attack on the syscoin network, for a reason i'm not fully understanding as I believe that this attack could work without the denial of service. This is all happening within the last few hours and is the best conjecture I could put together with limited information.
There was no 51% attack on Syscoin - that's impossible