Binance says hackers stole $6.3 billion in the largest crypto theft on record

The world's largest cryptocurrency exchange had a very bad Thursday night. Binance said attackers made off with an estimated $6.3 billion in digital assets, in what blockchain researchers are calling the biggest crypto theft ever recorded.

According to Binance, the unauthorized withdrawals began around 8:05 p.m. UTC on Thursday, October 29, and moved funds out across roughly ten different blockchains before the company could stop it. The exchange says its initial investigation points to a compromised laptop belonging to one of its engineers, which gave an attacker access to a service container and let them submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. Binance immediately suspended all deposits and withdrawals and said it expects to begin restoring service within about 48 hours. To put the scale in perspective, the loss is roughly four times larger than the $1.5 billion taken from the Bybit exchange in February 2025, which until Thursday was the largest crypto hack on record.

Binance says it has worked with blockchain partners to freeze roughly $3 billion of the stolen funds so far, including about $2.3 billion in the stablecoins USDT and USDC, which are easier to freeze than bitcoin or ether because they are issued by centralized companies. The exchange's co-founder, Changpeng Zhao, said on social media the incident "looked like a hack," and Binance's leadership has pledged that the company will cover all customer losses out of its own funds, emphasizing that user accounts themselves were not breached and that deposited funds remain safe. Separately, World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture associated with the family of President Trump, said it worked with the custody firm BitGo to help freeze some of the stolen assets.

Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs said it has "high confidence" the intrusion matches the pattern of a hacking group known as TraderTraitor, the same group the FBI linked to the 2025 Bybit theft and which investigators have associated with North Korea in the past. Neither Binance nor any government agency has formally named the attackers. The news rattled crypto markets broadly: bitcoin fell toward the $77,000 level, and exchanges in South Korea, where Binance has a large user base, issued withdrawal warnings as the benchmark KOSPI stock index tumbled more than 5 percent in early Friday trading, triggering an automatic trading pause.

Investors will be watching whether Binance can recover more of the frozen funds, and whether the incident pushes users toward smaller exchanges or, alternatively, toward more established platforms seen as better capitalized to absorb a shock of this size.

Will Binance users lose their money?

Binance says it will cover all losses from its own resources and that user funds are safe, though withdrawals remain paused while the company investigates.

Who is responsible for the hack?

No one has been officially named, but a blockchain analytics firm says it has high confidence the attack matches a hacking group previously linked to a 2025 exchange theft.

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