Binance says $6.3 billion was impacted in the largest crypto exchange hack ever

Binance says $6.3 billion in crypto was impacted in the largest exchange hack in history, with roughly $3 billion frozen and the company pledging to cover all losses.

An initial investigation suggests a compromised engineer’s laptop allowed an attacker to submit unauthorized withdrawals from the platform, Binance said. Several crypto industry observers had flagged concerns about a potential hack hours before the exchange confirmed the security issue. Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s founder and largest shareholder, posted on X: “It does look like a hack.” Zhao no longer manages the firm but remains its largest shareholder. Binance temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals following the incident as a precautionary measure and also said on X that Binance Alpha trading had been temporarily suspended. “Safety first: withdrawals are currently disabled until the environment is confirmed to be secure,” said Yi He, Binance’s co-chief executive. Binance.US, the much smaller platform that serves American residents, said its operations are not affected. The exchange said it found no evidence of any wallet private key leak. “We will share a detailed technical post-mortem once the investigation is complete and the facts are fully verified,” Binance said. The company said it will cover all losses using its Secure Asset Fund for Users and company funds, and that it will publish an updated Proof of Reserves after remediation efforts. “Our teams are working around the clock to resolve this issue safely and thoroughly,” Binance said in a statement.

A scramble to freeze stolen assets

Crypto issuers moved quickly. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said his firm froze more than $800 million in assets linked to the incident. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said his firm froze approximately $1.6 billion in assets related to the hack. “Protecting the industry and our partners is our main priority,” Ardoino said. Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president of stablecoins, said Ripple was actively freezing affected funds held in RLUSD, its dollar-backed stablecoin. Binance co-founder Yi He said Ripple helped halt $200 million of funds linked to the possible attack, and she thanked cryptocurrency issuers for freezing their assets. World Liberty Financial, a crypto company linked to US President Donald Trump and his family, said it worked with partners to freeze stolen funds. Coinbase said it was unaffected. Binance revoked the affected address authorization and enlisted blockchain intelligence firms to trace and recover funds, while Arkham Intelligence linked nearly $6 billion in digital assets across 55 wallet addresses tied to the exploit. On X, Binance said the current verified total frozen is $2.54 billion.

Attribution points to North Korea

TRM, a blockchain intelligence firm, assessed with high confidence that the attack was carried out by North Korea’s TraderTraitor unit, which investigators have linked to the Lazarus Group. Binance has not confirmed that attribution. “We are working closely with our law enforcement partners to confirm the identity of these criminals and bring them to justice,” the exchange said. Ari Redbord, TRM’s global head of policy, called the attack unprecedented. “When North Korea steals at this scale, the money funds weapons proliferation and other destabilising activity,” Redbord said. “That makes this a global security issue, not just a crypto theft.” The scale of the theft far exceeds previous incidents. Cybercriminals stole $2.87 billion in crypto across nearly 150 hacking incidents in 2025, according to TRM’s 2026 Crypto Crime Report. Bitget lost more than $350 million in a cyber theft more recently than the 2025 Bybit hack. Over the past several years, bad actors have also drained billions of dollars in crypto from decentralized exchanges.

Markets reel

Bitcoin fell more than 4 percent. Ethereum and Solana also fell sharply. Shares of Circle tumbled about 5 percent in after-hours trading. The previous record crypto heist was the 2025 Bybit hack of roughly $1.5 billion, which was linked to North Korea. Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange, with approximately $155 billion in assets under management per CoinMarketCap and more than 300 million registered users worldwide. The company was founded in China by Zhao in 2017 and has been the subject of regulatory scrutiny around the world. The company said in 2024 that it has more than $160 billion in assets under custody.

Sean Foley, a crypto markets expert at Macquarie University in Sydney, said the attack highlighted the risks of centralised exchanges and could spur more traders to use decentralised alternatives. “Binance is one of the largest centralised exchanges, and so a blow to confidence in them risks shocking confidence to many retail investors, which could dampen prices of crypto assets,” Foley said. “Any assets held at a centralised exchange are only as safe as the exchange itself, and the larger the exchange’s holdings, the larger a target it becomes.”