The attacker who drained Binance late on Thursday has broken 18,270 stolen bitcoin — worth about $1.4 billion — into 19 separate wallets, and none of them has sent a single coin onward, a CoinDesk trace of the blockchain shows.
Bitcoin wallets (Credits: Unsplash/CoinDesk)
18,270 Bitcoin Split Across 19 Wallets Via Peel Chain
At 20:20 UTC on Thursday, Binance’s hot wallet sent just over 18,270 BTC to one address in 11 transactions, all confirmed in block 973,732. The coins went through a so-called peel chain, where each transaction carves 1,000 BTC off into a fresh address and passes the rest to the next hop. Twenty-eight minutes later, a final 437.7 BTC landed in a 19th address.
Seventeen wallets now hold exactly 1,000 BTC each, one holds 832.5 BTC and one holds 437.7 BTC. As of 04:23 UTC Friday, none of the 19 had moved a coin. The only new activity is spam, as strangers have been sending the wallets tiny deposits worth a dollar or two since Thursday night.
Bitcoin Has No Issuer To Freeze It
The rest of the haul has gone very differently. Tether, Circle and Ripple froze more than $2.6 billion in tokens linked to the incident, because stablecoin issuers control the contracts behind their tokens. Bitcoin has no issuer to do that, so the $1.4 billion in BTC can only be stopped once it reaches an exchange, an OTC desk or a swap service.
TRM Labs attributed the theft to TraderTraitor, North Korea’s elite hacking unit, with “high confidence,” while Binance said preliminary findings point to a compromised employee laptop used to submit unauthorized withdrawals. Binance puts total losses from the attack at $6.3 billion and has pledged to cover them; deposits and withdrawals remain suspended.
Also Read: North Korea’s Lazarus Group Likely Behind Binance Hack, Blockchain Sleuths Say | India’s CoinDCX Curbs Crypto Futures Trading as Binance Hack Disrupts Liquidity
Source: CoinDesk — read the full story there.
