THE CRUNCH
Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, has disclosed that $6.3bn worth of crypto was stolen in what would be by far the biggest crypto heist on record. Blockchain analysis firms TRM Labs, Chainalysis and Elliptic have attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-backed hacking group, though Binance itself has not confirmed who was responsible. About $3bn of the stolen assets have been frozen so far, leaving roughly $3.3bn unaccounted for.
Binance's initial investigation pointed to a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer, which let an attacker reach a service container and submit unauthorised withdrawals. The company later said the probe had uncovered additional points of breach, calling it a complex attack, and stressed that it found no evidence of any wallet private key leak. According to TRM, most of the theft happened in about 20 minutes, with a single actor obtaining valid signatures for wallets on ten different blockchains within hours.
The response has been swift. Binance has suspended deposits and withdrawals, revoked the affected address authorisation and engaged law enforcement and blockchain intelligence partners. Tether froze nearly $1.57bn in linked assets and Circle more than $800m. Binance has pledged to cover all losses from its SAFU emergency reserve, valued at around $1.3bn, plus company funds, saying it has reserved over $6.34bn for the incident, $5bn of it already held in the affected tokens. It has also promised an updated proof of reserves once remediation is complete.
The scale dwarfs the previous record, the $1.46bn theft from Dubai-based exchange Bybit last year, also blamed on TraderTraitor. Markets reacted quickly, with bitcoin dropping more than 3% to a six-week low of $76,368 in early Asian trading. Analysts warned the breach may prompt investors to reassess the safety of assets held on centralised exchanges, and it adds to a string of large crypto thefts, including roughly $350m taken from Bitget in September.