Binance has confirmed that hackers stole $6.3 billion in cryptocurrency from the exchange, the largest crypto heist ever recorded. The company says about $3 billion of the stolen assets have already been frozen, and it has publicly committed to covering all losses for affected users.
The attack was disclosed in a series of updates posted to X, with Binance saying it is working with law enforcement. Deposits and withdrawals were temporarily suspended as a precaution, and the affected address had its authorization revoked. According to blockchain analysis firms TRM and Chainalysis, the attack is attributed to TraderTraitor, a North Korean cybercrime group with a long history of targeting crypto exchanges.
Binance hack: what we know about the $6.3 billion theft
Binance says the incident involved a compromised laptop belonging to one of its DevOps engineers, which allowed an attacker to access a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. But co-CEO Richard Teng stressed that it was not a single one-click action. "The attacker did not simply use one engineer's permissions," he said on X, adding that no evidence of a wallet private key leak has been found.
The exchange has an emergency reserve fund of around $1.3 billion at last valuation, and says it has also set aside over $6.34 billion of company funds to cover the incident. $5 billion of that is held in the same token assets that were stolen.
The scale is four times larger than the previous record, when $1.46 billion was stolen from Bybit last year. TRM chief policy officer Ari Redbord told Sky News that the theft shows how exposed the system is to sophisticated attackers moving at unprecedented speed.
- Total stolen: $6.3 billion, the largest crypto hack on record.
- Frozen so far: roughly $3 billion.
