Binance freezes $3B after record $6.3B crypto hack

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, said a security breach on Thursday, Oct. 29, affected an estimated $6.3 billion in digital assets. About $3 billion has been frozen on-chain so far, and the company has pledged to cover all losses, Reuters reported. The theft is more than four times the size of the $1.5 billion taken from Bybit in 2025, which was the previous record, according to the BBC.reuters.com+1

How the breach unfolded

Binance said its first findings pointed to a DevOps engineer's compromised laptop, which let an attacker get into a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawals. The exchange said it had found no evidence that any wallet private key was leaked, according to BleepingComputer. By Friday, Binance said its investigation had "uncovered additional points of breach." Co-CEO Richard Teng wrote that "the attacker did not simply use one engineer's permissions," The Next Web reported.bleepingcomputer.com+1

TRM Labs said the attacker moved about $6.36 billion out of Binance wallets on ten blockchains, most of it within roughly 20 minutes starting at 20:05 UTC. The firm attributed the attack "with high confidence" to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state hacking unit, SecurityWeek reported. Chainalysis reached the same conclusion. Elliptic, another analytics firm, put the losses higher, at $6.43 billion. North Korea has denied involvement in hacks in the past.securityweek.com+2

Stablecoin freezes and recovery

The stablecoin issuers moved quickly. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said his company had frozen more than 1.567 billion USDT. Circle ↘ 9.31% froze more than 800 million USDC USD Coin "in coordination with law enforcement," Help Net Security reported. TRM said the attacker still holds more than 420,000 ETH and 18,270 BTC, which no issuer can freeze.helpnetsecurity.com+1

Bobby Lee, founder of Ballet, a company that makes crypto hardware wallets, told Bloomberg that the stolen Bitcoin ↗ 0.55% is probably unrecoverable. "Freezing it is different from recovery," he said.bloomberg.com

Binance says deposits are working normally again. Withdrawals stay paused while it overhauls its withdrawal service, and the exchange expects to restart them within 48 hours. Co-founder Yi He said withdrawals should resume by Sunday, Nov. 1. Binance.US said it was not affected.bloomberg.com+2

Market fallout

Bitcoin dropped to a six-week low and Ether Ethereum ↗ 0.48% also fell. In extended U.S. trading, shares of Coinbase ↘ 10.62% and Strategy ↘ 1.09% slid. Analysts quoted by Reuters said the bigger risk is liquidity. They warned that locked funds could set off margin shortages and forced liquidations at other venues. One analyst said: "The world's largest exchange should have the strongest controls in the industry, and it has still been breached."reuters.com