Binance has set aside more than $6.34 billion in company resources to restore customer balances after attackers stole an estimated $6.3 billion in the largest cryptocurrency theft in history, the exchange said Friday, according to CoinDesk.
Binance co-CEO Richard Teng (Credits: CoinDesk/Personae Digital)
Binance Hack: What Happened on October 29
Late Thursday, attackers drained an estimated $6.3 billion from Binance’s hot wallets across multiple blockchains, with most of the coins — including bitcoin, ether, and USDT/USDC stablecoins — leaving in a burst that lasted only about 20 minutes. Binance’s initial investigation indicates the attackers compromised a DevOps engineer’s laptop to access an internal service environment and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions, with no evidence of a wallet private key leak, the company said.
Blockchain analytics firms Chainalysis and TRM Labs have linked the exploit with high confidence to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group, given the sophistication and speed of the attack — mirroring the February 2025 Bybit heist the FBI attributed to North Korea.
How Binance Is Covering the $6.3 Billion Loss
Binance said $5 billion is already held in the exact token assets that were affected, and it is buying the remainder on public markets and over the counter so reserves match exactly what users lost — using its own corporate money, without touching customer funds. Partners have frozen about $3 billion in stolen assets, including $2.3 billion in USDT and USDC stablecoins frozen by Tether and Circle.
Withdrawals remain paused pending security checks, with the exchange expecting to resume within about 48 hours. Binance says it will back all user balances with its Proof of Reserves verification. “We will weather this storm,” the company told CoinDesk.
Also Read: How One Ethereum Upgrade Feature Helped Drain $2.5 Billion From Binance’s Wallet
Source: CoinDesk — read the full story there.
