Binance suffers US$6.3 billion hack 30 October 2026Global Reporter: Matthew Challis
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A hack on 29 October 2026 affected an estimated US$6.3 billion in assets on the cryptocurrency platform Binance, reported to be the biggest attack in crypto history.
In response to the breach, the platform says it is working with blockchain partners to halt affected assets and has frozen roughly US$3 billion onchain thus far.
Circle and Tether have frozen over US$800 million and US$1.567 billion in USDC and USDT, respectively.
Binance intends to “cover all losses” from the Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) — a reserve fund of approximately US$1 billion in Bitcoin — in addition to the company’s funds.
The firm claims that “user funds are safe”, deposits are “unaffected”, and it will publish an updated proof of reserves once remediation is completed.
Binance has temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals, revoked the affected address authorisation, and engaged law enforcement and blockchain intelligence partners to trace funds.
As of its latest update, the company believes the attack involved a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, allowing a hacker to gain unauthorised access to the platform, and has since uncovered additional points of breach, but did not specify what they were.
Blockchain analytics company Chainalysis says it is “committed to supporting Binance and the wider industry” as the stolen funds are traced and they work to “mitigate additional losses”.
Elliptic, an onchain transaction monitoring firm, and Chainalysis both believe the hack matches the technical signatures of TraderTraitor, a cyber unit linked to North Korea.
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