The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, Binance, lost $6.3 billion to hackers in a historic theft that analysts blamed on North Korea and warned might erode trust in digital assets.
The revelation caused cryptocurrency values to drop, and Binance claimed it would reimburse the losses while stopping withdrawals.
Stablecoin issuers like Tether, Circle, and the Trump-backed World Liberty Financial swiftly froze almost half of the pilfered assets.
“This was a complex attack, and we are doing all we can in coordination with law enforcement to resolve it,” Binance wrote in an X post.
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The exchange stated that client money was secure and that it was collaborating with partners to freeze some of the impacted assets, with roughly $3 billion found thus far.
In the following 45 hours, withdrawal services are anticipated to resume. The status of the remaining $3.3 billion was not mentioned.
Binance operates a secure asset fund for customers, a $1 billion bitcoin reserve intended to safeguard client assets in the case of security breaches.
Teng, the co-CEO, stated that “and company funds” will pay for any losses.
According to US blockchain analysis firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis, the majority of the theft occurred in about 20 minutes starting late on Thursday and resembled earlier significant attacks attributed to North Korea.
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Similar to a 2025 robbery at a cryptocurrency exchange, Bybit, that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation linked to North Korea, TRM claimed that the attackers were able to order wallets that Binance uses to empty into hacker-controlled wallets.
The attack was attributed by TRM to North Korea’s top cyber force, according to an examination of the hack that the company published on its website.
Chainalysis and TRM both expressed a strong belief that North Korea was at fault.
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US and South Korean authorities, as well as cybersecurity specialists, said North Korea has long employed state-affiliated cyber operations for money theft, espionage, and revenue.
That is something North Korea consistently disputes. Teng stated on X, “Your money is safe, and we’re covering every loss.” “Our investigation has not attributed responsibility to any individual.”
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Aravind Srinivasan of market maker GSR described the theft as the largest hack ever as digital asset prices dropped across the board.
Bitcoin sank to $76,368, its lowest level in six weeks, and ether slipped more than 3% to $2,178, a two-month low, before the market steadied.
BNB, the token that began as Binance Coin and is used to cover fees on the exchange, shed 5% over the previous day to trade at $709.70, per CoinGecko.
The unease spilled into publicly traded crypto companies too: Coinbase, which said the breach didn’t touch it, lost 4.8%, and Strategy, a major bitcoin holder, dropped almost 6% in extended US trading.
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Compromised laptop
Binance said its early findings point to a hacked engineer’s laptop as the likely starting point, giving the attacker a foothold in one of its systems from which to pull out unauthorized withdrawals.
The company said its security team was mapping the full route of the intrusion through that device, and it later acknowledged finding further places where the attackers got in.
Mark Karpeles, who used to run the now-defunct Tokyo exchange Mt. Gox, which fell apart twelve years ago after $500 million in bitcoin was taken, believes the thieves most likely got hold of the private keys for at least two Binance wallets.
He noted that Binance seems to have spread its holdings over several systems so that any one breach exposes only a portion, though even a partial loss from a single hack is substantial.
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Analysts said the damage could reach well beyond the stolen funds, since the crypto sector was already strained by higher US interest rates and weaker buying from exchange-traded fund investors.
Tim Sun, a senior researcher at Hong Kong-based HashKey Group, said the incident could further reduce investors’ appetite for risk and push them to rethink how safe it is to keep assets on centralized exchanges.
Hack size tops Binance’s secure asset fund
Binance, the platform where users buy, sell, and trade digital assets, counts 335 million registered users worldwide and held roughly $162.8 billion in customer assets as of its 2025 annual report.
Tether said it froze nearly $1.57 billion tied to the theft, and Circle froze more than $800 million.
World Liberty Financial said it coordinated with the custodian BitGo to lock down funds.
Binance co-founder Yi He added that about $27 million in stablecoins and around $2 million in World Liberty tokens were frozen, along with roughly $200 million frozen by Ripple.
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The breach follows a run of major crypto thefts. TRM Labs researchers found that attackers took $2.9 billion in crypto across nearly 150 incidents last year, and in September Bitget reported losing about $350 million from its platform, further evidence of how exposed the industry is to hackers.
Cristiano Ventricelli, vice president for digital assets at Moody’s Ratings, said the wider credit and industry fallout will hinge on the final loss figure, which counterparties are affected, how much is recovered, and, above all, whether the episode triggers broader disruption or a loss of confidence across the digital-asset sector.
