ع
The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange disclosed a security breach on October 29 that resulted in the unauthorized withdrawal of approximately 6.3 billion dollars from its internet-connected hot wallets across multiple blockchains. Binance said in a statement that it paused withdrawals immediately while allowing deposits to continue and collaborated with industry partners to freeze roughly 3 billion dollars of the stolen funds on chain. The exchange stressed that customer assets held in cold storage were never at risk and that only a small portion of total user holdings had been exposed during routine withdrawal processing.
According to updates published on its support site, Binance has now replenished 90 percent of the impacted tokens by allocating more than 6.34 billion dollars from its corporate treasury, a partial deployment of the Secure Asset Fund for Users and a portion of its futures insurance fund. All holdings of bitcoin, ether, USDT, BNB, SOL, USDC, XRP, USD1, RLUSD and ZEC are fully backed at 100 percent following a new proof-of-reserves snapshot taken at midnight UTC on October 31. The remaining 10 percent involves less-liquid tokens outside the top 10 that the exchange continues to acquire through market and over-the-counter channels.
Binance stated, “Binance will absorb the financial impact of these stolen funds, not our users.” The company’s chief executive Richard Teng added that the attacker employed a self-destruct mechanism to erase traces along with an EIP-7702 delegation that bypassed normal approval controls. A Reuters report noted that the exchange remains on track to resume withdrawals on November 1 after completing final security checks.
This single incident surpasses the combined value of all crypto thefts recorded across the entire industry in 2025, according to Chainalysis data that placed last year’s total losses above 3.4 billion dollars. TRM Labs and Chainalysis have attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, a hacking group linked to North Korea that has accounted for a growing share of such breaches in recent years. The scale of the theft highlights vulnerabilities that persist despite heightened industry focus on wallet security and transaction monitoring.
Binance’s response draws on the Secure Asset Fund for Users, which the exchange converted entirely into 15,000 bitcoin valued at approximately 1 billion dollars in February 2026 to serve as a long-term reserve asset. The fund, established in 2018 and held under regulatory oversight in Abu Dhabi Global Market, had previously covered losses from a 2019 incident involving 7,000 bitcoin. A CoinDesk assessment found that the current replenishment exceeds the SAFU balance alone and relies heavily on broader corporate resources kept in cryptocurrency.
CertiK statistics show crypto hacks, scams and exploits produced 2.92 billion dollars in reported losses across 356 incidents in the 12 months ending September 2026, a period that saw incident counts rise even as overall dollar losses declined from the prior year. The latest Binance breach occurs as blockchain analytics firms continue to track movements of the stolen funds, some of which remain active on the Tron network. The exchange has committed to further transparency through updated proof-of-reserves reports and ongoing purchases to achieve full coverage.
