Hackers stole $6.3 billion from Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, in the biggest crypto theft ever. The attack breaks the previous record by a wide margin. It also comes at a hard time for digital assets, which were already under pressure from higher interest rates in the United States and weaker demand from exchange-traded fund buyers. Analysts said it could shake faith in crypto and in the exchanges that hold it.
Most of the theft happened in about 20 minutes starting late Thursday (Oct. 29), Reuters reported. TRM Labs and Chainalysis, two U.S. firms that trace crypto transactions, said they’re highly confident North Korea was responsible. TRM said the attackers got Binance’s wallets to empty into wallets the hackers controlled. That mirrors the 2025 heist at the exchange Bybit, which the FBI blamed on Pyongyang. North Korea routinely denies such claims.
Binance said a hacked laptop belonging to one of its engineers may have been the entry point. Later, in a security incident update posted Friday (Oct. 30) on social platform X, the company said subsequent investigation found additional points of breach. The exchange halted withdrawals and said it expected to restart them within 48 hours. It located about $3 billion of the stolen funds but didn’t say what happened to the remaining $3.3 billion.
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Partners including Tether and Circle froze about $3 billion, Reuters reported Friday in an update to its original report.
Binance keeps a $1 billion bitcoin reserve to cover breaches and said in the Friday security incident update that the company will cover every loss. It said it had already covered 80% of the impacted amount and is buying the remaining token assets.
Analysts didn’t mince words. Aravind Srinivasan at market maker GSR told Reuters it’s the biggest hack in history. Mark Karpeles, the former head of the collapsed exchange Mt. Gox, said the attackers likely got the private keys to at least two Binance wallets. He added that Binance seems to spread its assets across several systems, which limits the damage from any one breach. Even so, he said, the loss is huge. Tim Sun, a senior researcher at Hong Kong’s HashKey Group, said the breach could “prompt investors to reassess the safety of assets held on centralized exchanges.”
Markets reacted right away, the report said. Bitcoin fell to a six-week low of $76,368, and ether dropped more than 3% to $2,178. Binance’s BNB token slid 5%. Coinbase, which said it wasn’t affected, fell 4.8%, and Strategy dropped nearly 6% in after-hours trading. The theft is more than double the $2.9 billion that TRM said attackers stole in nearly 150 attacks all of last year.
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