Binance hack: about $6.4 billion drained from the exchange
According to Decrypt, attackers drained about $6.4 billion from Binance hot wallets. Tether and Circle froze part of the funds, and the exchange says it will cover all losses.
As Decrypt reports, attackers drained roughly $6.4 billion from Binance hot wallets on Thursday. The theft began at about 4:05 p.m. ET, spanned roughly 10 blockchains, and most of the funds left within about 20 minutes. Chainalysis and TRM Labs put the total at the same figure, more than four times the previous record, the $1.5 billion Bybit heist in February 2025. We covered the first reports of the suspected hack earlier.
How the breach happened
The attack targeted the exchange's own infrastructure, not the blockchains. Binance first linked the incident to a compromised laptop of a DevOps engineer, then found "additional points of breach." CEO Richard Teng described a more complex attack that did not simply use one engineer's permissions. The exchange says it found no evidence that private keys leaked. On Ethereum, according to TRM Labs, the attacker used EIP-7702 and 50 pre-signed authorizations. TRM Labs and Chainalysis attribute the attack to the North Korea-linked group TraderTraitor.
Frozen funds and the response
Tether froze more than $1.5 billion and Circle about $823 million. Roughly $3 billion has been frozen or located in total, but the attacker still controls over $3 billion in assets that issuers cannot freeze. Binance says it will cover all losses with company funds and its SAFU reserve, and that customer assets were never touched. Withdrawals are paused; the exchange aims to restore them by Sunday and publish a full proof of reserves by Monday. Bitcoin fell about 4%, to around $76,400.
For anyone doing USDT exchange, it is a reminder that stablecoins are centralized and issuers can blacklist specific addresses.
Source: Decrypt
