Hackers siphoned off $6.3 billion from crypto exchange Binance in the biggest heist that the digital-asset industry has ever faced, the latest in a slew of security incidents afflicting the financial sector.
The world’s largest crypto trading platform suspended withdrawals and pledged to cover all losses. Binance said in a post on X that about $3 billion of the assets had been frozen on blockchain networks. In another post, co-founder Yi He said withdrawals were expected to resume by Sunday.
While the full details of the Binance breach have yet to emerge, the incident comes amid growing concern about the risks posed by hackers in the age of artificial intelligence. Other recent cyberattacks have hit prediction market Polymarket, South Korean financial firms Mirae Asset Global Investments Co. and Daishin Securities, as well as Japanese currency trading platform GMO Internet Group Inc.
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Blockchain intelligence firms TRM Labs, Chainalysis and Elliptic have all pointed to North Korea as being behind the Binance heist, with Chainalysis labeling the incident as “the largest in the history of crypto, and one of the single-largest financial crimes of all time.” The funds drained in the attack were a mix of the largest cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ether, and the dollar-backed stablecoins USDT and USDC.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is aware of the Binance incident and is coordinating with its partners “to understand the scope of the activity, evaluate potential impacts, and coordinate appropriate investigative steps,” it said in a statement to Bloomberg News on Friday.
Secret Service investigators are also “working around the clock” with the private sector to recover stolen funds, a spokesperson said. The Justice Department is aware of reports about the attack but does not comment on investigations, a spokesperson said.
The breach is a setback for an industry that is maturing and seeking to expand into traditional finance. Before now, the biggest publicly known crypto hack occurred at exchange Bybit in February 2025, in which attackers made off with almost $1.5 billion in tokens.
Notorious previous episodes of theft and fraud among fallen crypto giants such as FTX and Mt. Gox set the stage for protracted bear markets, bruises the industry has worked to put behind it in US President Donald Trump’s promised new era of regulatory clarity for cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin fell on news of the Binance attack, dropping below $77,000 for the first time in more than a month. It pared losses later, trading at around $77,700 at 11:20 a.m. in New York.
For the crypto faithful who’d been basking in a two-month-long price rebound, the Binance incident has cast a shadow over the recovery.
“Binance is such a behemoth in crypto that any hit to confidence in them is a hit to confidence in the industry as a whole, especially as people have already been skittish over the increasing cyber capabilities of AI,” said Fredrick Collins, chief executive officer and co-founder of crypto data platform Velo Data.
Binance dwarfs its industry rivals. It holds roughly $135.2 billion in assets, compared with $28.6 billion at the second-largest exchange OKX, according to DefiLlama data.
The hackers appear to have exploited how Binance authorizes transactions, according to TRM. They seemingly gained access to the exchange’s systems and used internal software to authorize transfers across 10 different blockchains, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, it said.
“TRM attributes the attack to TraderTraitor, North Korea’s elite hacking unit, based on robust on and off-chain intelligence,” the firm said. “We make this judgment with high confidence.”
Binance said the incident may involve a compromised software engineer’s laptop, among “additional points of breach.” It found no evidence of leaked private keys, it said.
“This was a complex attack, and we are doing all we can in coordination with law enforcement to resolve it,” Binance said in a post on X.
An emergency insurance and reserve fund from Binance called the Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) was established in 2018 to serve as a backstop for customers in “extreme situations,” according to the exchange. The SAFU is generally maintained at around $1 billion, but has fluctuated in the past in tandem with market movements, Binance said in 2024.
The two biggest stablecoin issuers said they took steps to freeze affected currency. Paolo Ardoino, the chief executive officer of Tether, said in an X post that it froze more than $1.5 billion of the stablecoin USDT “related to a potential Binance exchange hack.” Jeremy Allaire, who runs Circle Internet Group Inc., said $800 million of its USDC token had been frozen amid “reports of a potential exploit involving Binance.”
Sentiment was already fragile after a spate of crypto security incidents. In recent months, hundreds of millions of dollars were drained from Bitget, while tampering involving Ledger devices also led to millions of dollars in losses.
“Attackers are operating at unprecedented speed and scale” but “the tools to track and trace operate at that speed too,” said Ari Redbord, global head of policy at TRM Labs. “Stablecoin issuers freeze within hours. Investigators follow funds across chains in real time.”
Traders had already been bracing for greater volatility in the crypto market this week, with $11 billion in options set to expire Friday. This comes days ahead of the US midterm elections taking place next week, when Democrats could potentially retake one or both chambers of Congress and open the door to greater regulatory scrutiny for the industry.
Exchange thefts and malfeasance have been an ever-present backdrop of crypto’s almost two-decade ascent, the most famous of which was the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX in November 2022. In what remains perhaps the most notorious hacking incident, Japan-based Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox was struck in 2011. Over time, the hackers made off with tokens worth billions of dollars based on the current market price. Mt. Gox eventually went bankrupt.
“It’s a huge damage to crypto because of the consistent successful hacks in the space,” said Tian Zeng, chief executive officer of crypto hedge fund Third Eye. “The fact that exploits keep happening makes it dangerous in the age of newest AI models being released every two weeks.”
The Binance incident came on the same day event-contract venue Polymarket halted trading on its international exchange for an hour after it said that a third-party software provider was compromised. More than 700 Polymarket users were drained of $2.7 million in funds, said blockchain analytics platform Bubblemaps, in a post on X. A spokesman declined to comment on the numbers.
South Korea’s second-largest crypto exchange Bithumb was also among the country’s finance firms hit by data breaches this week, with hundreds of customer records affected, Yonhap reported.
Photograph: Binance logo; photo credit: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg
Topics Cyber
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